It's also important to note the difference between LTS and 10 release. If you want stable you stick with LTS. This has been the case for at least as long as I've been an Ubuntu user. The thing that pisses me off to no end is that pain you have to go through to get a xen kernel on Ubuntu which makes it a pain in the ass to install in VM on XenServer. Ended up creating PV VM, using a Debian kernel, and then creating a VM template. So when I create a new VM I resize the disk to be what I need. Of course there are other errors, tcpdump and dhclient on my Ubuntu server installs seems to error on bootup with Debian but fortunately for me, it's a server so I just removed dhclient. Probably just going to remove AppArmor too since that seems to be causing the tcpdump error. A lot of effort just for a PV setup when it all works by default with Windows. Of course SUSE, Fedora, CentOS all work fine with their regular installers.
You'd have to be of the crowd that leaves the basement to go and party or travel. I love my netbook, working in wiring closets is a breeze now and 10+ hours of battery life means that I can keep documentation up to date as the majority of my job is setting up temporary infrastructure. Anyone that is mobile a lot will appreciate a netbook.
That's because you're using the 32bit version. The 32bit version of Vista is terrible as well. Windows 7 also starts out slow but as you use your computer it gets noticeably faster, much the same way as Vista and is honestly why Vista generated so much negative PR. Most people when evaluating the OS don't evaluate it for long enough to get a true feel for it. After a couple months now with Windows 7 at home I can say that it is quite a bit faster than the initial install and certainly faster than XP was. Of course with a quad core processor and enough ram to make life good, let's face it, both were fast.
The question is, why are you running 32bit Win7 on a machine that can run 64bit Win7?
This is the same argument those dialup users used when they said they didn't want broadband. The reality is that they don't understand what they are missing.
A 12 year old computer will have very limited capabilities and while it can be used for things like writing papers its more or less just a glorified type-writer. People would be missing out on a lot of what the web has to offer running such old machines. After 4 years most people I see will buy a new computer and pass the old one on to one of the wee ones. Some go as far as 8 years back but at that stage full screen flash is out of the question and at some point waiting for every little thing ruins the fun of computing.
Course I ran an Athlon 750 until last year when it finally died. It's only limitation was anything video related. A new video card can only do so much without the rest of the system feeding it faster. The good news is that people are throwing out old machines less and less so the poor can benefit that way.
The sad part is that most people weren't buying new machines to run the latest OS, they were buying new machines that weren't so cluttered with crap because most people lack basic organizational skills. Since Microsoft took so long coming out with a product after XP they missed that train of the 9x era where people did upgrade their machines just for the latest OS because it gave them new abilities. Now the focus on Windows isn't in new functionality but in making existing functionality more accessible to users.
Ubuntu has lacked a lot of what desktop users expect and the inconsistencies are something that turn off a lot of users. I run Ubuntu and the latest kernel upgrade killed the ability for network manager to manage my network card. As opposed to another kernel update which broke the network card of my aspire one. It was working using the stock kernel and then I had to run out and get a kernel patch so I could use some wired networking fun. These are not issues Windows users typically encounter.
Again, warrantless wiretapping was illegal and it was up to congress to enforce such laws that the executive was breaking. Of course not only did they not prosecute but they changed the law to make it legal in certain cases despite there being perfectly good oversight processes that don't endanger lives.
The president can't introduce legislation which is why bad laws start with congress and it would be up to the president to veto them. There was very little political will to fight with the president because of the whole Clinton debacle which was the last time congress was vaguely doing their job even if it was barking up a ridiculous tree in my opinion. They were at least investigating the allegations that something illegal was going on.
As for unemployment with ridiculous high turn-over, I think you fail to understand what happens when you lose your job. People will tide themselves over for a few weeks or months if they were smart and saw it coming but few have that kind of savings and they overinvested in houses they can't afford and made all sorts of other stupid investments, they lost their income, are now saddled with debt and the new job is paying them less and that's all if they manage to keep the new job. Even on top of that, it takes months to recover from unemployment so if you get laid off of your new job within six months you are now bumped into poverty in a lot of cases.
Of course this hasn't happened to me, just many people I know from all parts of this country except for the mid-west and Vermont since people seem to be fiscally more responsible in those areas. There most of course are exceptions to that rule.
High turnover also shows the overall state of businesses, if all businesses are needing to lay off employees then you have a coming tidal wave of depression. Across the board you see companies shrinking their staffing as much as possible. This is why I do the work of 10 IT guys, they refuse to hire help because they need to maintain certain levels of liquidity. Fortunately for me it does mean a level of job security seldom seen in the industry right now.
The bottom line is that Americans are going to have to learn to be more thrifty, a talent they used to have and something that has lost a lot of value over the last couple decades.
Of course it doesn't hurt when the president sends a message to the people saying that credit will solve all our problems. I like the thought process of doing the exact same things that got us into the mess and then hoping that will fix the problem.
Sounds like you're describing Crestron since all the functionality you mention you can find in a Crestron home or office. The owner of the company I work for is all about it even though it's overpriced crap. I think you're right about why it hasn't taken off though, that licensing has kept it all prohibitively expensive but more importantly if the power goes out living in your house is miserable and the robotics break a lot. When the quality and logistics get worked out better you'll find it in more homes.
Is a failure to fix a broken program any different than creating the program yourself? Obviously Bush agreed with it and so he did nothing.
Let us also keep in mind that it was passed under a heavily republican congress. I'm so sick of everyone blaming the president for crap congress was doing or not doing. If congress had been doing it's job through both Clinton and Bush years then we wouldn't be in this mess. They are too corrupt and spineless for real action. If there was one positive contribution by Bush's administration it was that action can happen regardless of congressional oversight or lack there of. Of course most people view this as a high negative as they should since a major function of congress is to balance out the powers of the president which is a function they even now are unwilling to properly perform.
He left a huge wake of problems behind, much it through broken policies that were already in place and much of it through new policies which degraded our situation fast. The unemployment figures were always doctored and there was too much emphasis on a single number to begin with. Everyone knows someone who got laid off from work due to falling revenues. Who cares if 10 million are out of work now if a different 10 million are out of work the next week? The rate is the same but the number of people affected is much higher.
I hear you on the not wanting to blame everything on Bush when there is plenty of blame to go around. Even though I hate the man and all of his policies, blind, rabid, reactionary politics won't get us anywhere pleasant.
Let me get this straight; you like iTunes but it has a lot of usability issues for you? Why do you like iTunes? Sounds to me like you think it's a piece of crap like the rest of us because you've actually used it but somehow because it's an Apple product that it's still an okay product? I don't understand this mentality and a lot of people share especially when it comes to the iPod and the crap users put up with. My father's Ipod froze up on him, he had to browse the web to find a way to fix it. I'd never seen an mp3 player freeze up before then. Why do people put up with an inferior product? At least with the ipod I kinda get it with the iTunes store back before there weren't really any legal alternatives. Itunes always sucked though and probably always will. Just use Winamp on Windows or Rhythmbox on Ubuntu or whatever other media player you like, they are pretty much all better than iTunes.
Actually no, when you reboot you still have previous backups. Windows keeps several registry backups in several files so you can always restore whatever is broken. This is the Windows XP or greater area of course. That is of course on top of system restore which can retain many backups by default depending on how much installing and uninstalling you are doing.
Registry hacks are not friendly for regular folk which is why it is so discouraged and is the same reason that editing text files is considered unfriendly. Modifying fstab is far from friendly especially if you are new to the world. Yeah it gets easy when you realize everything is a file and certain consistencies expose themselves but for the new people it is highly inaccessible exactly like the registry. The only difference is that Microsoft does all it can to prevent you from having to go in and manually edit anything. This is why a patch was created enabling the disable and uninstall functions.
You're right that the registry is a great place to high malware as much of it is not very well documented. I can't imagine why any application developer would want to use it.
The original question mentioned products that performed this task so no, they aren't out of luck. Bonding WAN links into a super circuit is something we've been doing for years as remote sites simply can't get the level of bandwidth that I have at HQ. HQ has a gig Internet connection, some events I put on are in areas where I can get 3meg DSL. I ended up bonding 8 DSLs and 4 T1s just to get enough bandwidth to function since I stream live video during out event and we use SIP trunking for all phone calls the Internet is pretty important to us. Ecessa, then Astrocom presented the only affordable option as all the rest were at least an order of magnitude more expensive.
The only requirement is that you have devices on both ends to handle the out of order traffic and to manage latency across links. This can all be done with BGP if you are experienced in the realm of networking or it can be done with Ecessa Powerlink or Fat Pipe's offerings if you want a point and click simple solution because some of us would rather devote our time elsewhere than complicating our routing tables with BGP. Two Cisco routers wtih HSRP or HP layer 3 switches with XRRP and you can have a fully redundant solution though.
I think you missed the point as the question wasn't about having multiple WAN connections, that's easy, it was about bonding those connections so they are one big pipe. I'm sure there are products out there that will allow you to do it with Linux, I know there are BGP routers available that could handle the bonding necessary. Of course Ecessa is a less problematic approach as it's clustered and pretty easy to use right out of the box. I use them to bond 12 Internet connections in Florida when I do an event down there because I can't seem to get more than crap for bandwidth. On the other end I have optical Internet at gig speeds so it's pretty straight forward as long as you have clustered units on both ends.
WAN load balancing is relatively new and can still be very expensive to do properly. Ecessa was the first to do it affordably for small businesses. Of course I started using them when they were Astrocom. Ran into some VLAN funky behavior but once you get it working you set it and forget it and any approach that is that hands off is okay by me since I'm busy deploying enough switches to give hundreds Internet access for a 4 day event.
Very few ISPs will support you, you should never rely on a 3rd party providing a special service for you when you can load balance it yourself with two cisco routers using BGP or with Ecessa Powerlinks should your budget be constrained like mine was. Then you don't have to worry about what the hopefully various ISPs that you use support.
If I provisioned secondary services and let them sit idle then accounting would report it and then I wouldn't have a secondary link anymore. I have Ecessa WAN Load balancers and they get the job done on the cheap compared to the alternatives I researched from Fat Pipe for instance. I put on a show that requires real-time streaming of video among many other Internet features required to perform. The only Internet I can get is 3meg DSL which hurts at that location. Every other location I can get optical Internet on the cheap. My last show I had 150meg of bandwidth and life was good. The load balancers are clustered per site, you'll have to have units on both ends to coordinate packet transmission as others have noted, latency among links can cause responsiveness problems. Fortunately the load balancer takes care of that allowing me to set thresholds and prioritize traffic.
Not only do I have redundant transparent Internet connections but I can use all the bandwidth as I see fit making it easier to justify the expense of service which for us is temporary. The only problem I ran into was with our SIP phones pass-thru port as it would put workstations on another VLAN. Something about how it handles the traffic requires me to connect another cable to the load balancer and feed the VLAN directly instead of using the trunk port. All said and done it was pretty easy to deploy though.
In my case I make sure I have multiple static IP addresses, should the load balancer experience some failure my firewall will detect the failure and route directly advertising a working link via OSPF. The cost is higher so the link only gets used by my main router if the load balancer becomes unavailable. Automatic fault tolerance is a beautiful thing when you make 80% of your money for the year in 7 days.
I have to disagree with your statement about popularity. If the majority of people didn't trust MS they wouldn't keep deploying it. That means that MS hasn't violated the trust of the majority and quite frankly, no one can please everyone.
While I agree that Microsoft shouldn't be trusted I understand that the majority of businesses out there do trust MS and only use basic functionality which in the Windows world simply works. Those of us that try to do unique things run into problems so we like flexible solutions so we ended trying alternatives and become Linux users. I think you would be hard pressed to come up with protocol busting behavior from MS beyond that of IE functionality which at the time all browsers were doing. Remember Netscape 4 and the lovely behavior it gave us? MS was just playing following the leader and since they had a nice install base surprise surprise, they came out on top. NTLM v1 was long considered a bad idea and v2 was clearly an improvement from a security standpoint. Could they have made it more interoperable? Probably but how much should they spend on it? At what point does breaking compatibility make the most sense? Apple does it just fine rather routinely and without backlash but MS seems to get blasted as untrustworthy for the exact same behavior so I say the popularity does determine trustworthiness.
That is precisely what you get with Citrix XenServer combined with Citrix Essentials, there are many other products for Xen that give you everything that Amazon is offering including virtual switches and load balancers.
When I want new instances I just spawn new instances and it will take care of provisioning storage for me. I'll grant it's not as slick but there is no reason to call it the cloud when all it does is virtualize all your infrastructure. You're not using any new software on the back-end to create your cloud. In short, it's just people trying to push software as a service by hiding technical details so businesses won't just build their own. Given how expensive I've seen some EC2 setups I can see how many businesses would rather just build their own once they are of sufficient size. For small businesses it's probably a great way to deploy since virtual infrastructure for small businesses is still sorely lacking due to licensing costs from all the major players or in the case of Microsoft, the straight lack of features.
Takes about 10 seconds and happens without dropping so much as a packet. Of course that will depend on your back-end storage. I'm fortunate enough to run with NetApp though so it's all gravy. On a side-note, Citrix Essentials for XenServer is pretty cool with their SAN integration technology. Thin-provisioning on the fly is the way to be! When I make a storage repository it is 20megs until I create a VM and even then it will only take up space that is actually taken up. Combined with volume level deduplication and you have yourself a pretty efficient environment. Just wish people would stop calling it a cloud.
No, the problem is all the administrators that think editing a few text files or clicking a few buttons in a GUi is all that is involved.
All the people that think creating a user on any platform makes them an admin. There are too many IT people that got into it for the money and they are clearly still around as I'm sure you can see from other posts on this article. People who are passionate will go above and beyond and create unique and easy to manage solutions where those fake admins will kludge solutions together that either won't scale, are terrible from a security perspective, or simply too difficult for staff to actually use. I see this in the networking world all the time and I see it in the programming world all the time.
MS just enabled idiots to perform most of the small functions without actually learning what they are doing. From my perspective it's great as the small stuff I can do very fast very efficiently. The harder more advanced stuff like data management requires a much deeper understanding of how systems interact and that's where you separate interns from admins.
I was referring more to countries like North Korea or Syria, or Lebanon. Iran while a relatively larger country from a land mass perspective isn't that large in terms of population centers. Hit a big city and expect fall-out to hurt Israel let alone our troops on the ground in Iraq. Combined with contaminated water supply and even Egypt could see large scale ecological devastation.
My only point is that you can't use the weapons without hurting your friends. This is why most modern military funding is in the realm of conventional weaponry and why it's so scary that radical nations would achieve this level of sophistication without learning the lessons that we did. Modern countries see nukes as a way of leveling the playing field forgetting that our conventional weaponry far surpasses them. You need only look back a year or so with the super cavitating torpedoes. The U.S. Navy wasn't impressed because the Russians developed it 20 years ago and we've long since developed defenses for such things. As a result they will never gain technologically superiority as they are trying to play catch up to a country a few decades ahead of them. Concentrating on fighting wars the way they used to be fought isn't likely to lead anywhere pleasant for any modern power as they adjusted their tactics for good reason. Nuclear weapons are not practical nor politically advantageous to actually use. Countries that don't understand that will put innocent people in harms way.
Of course people can argue over whether or not the American population is considered innocent. That's another debate though.
Of course you need to keep in mind that obliterating every city in say Russia would cause horrific conditions for China and anyone down wind from radiation. Same with any country that is sufficiently leveled using nuclear weapons. In short, everyone loses including the people that did the firing regardless of counter strike or not. That's the problem with tiny countries getting nukes, if they were to fire you couldn't fire back without significantly harming your allies.
Install powershell, or openssh, why am I not allowed to use cygwin? I don't need cygwin anyways as powershell is quite capable on all Windows from XP on up which covers that last 8 years pretty much.
The only remote administration that does impact a user is RDP, all other things from remote registry to installing applications in the background can be down without the users knowledge.
Also, scripts can run with elevated permissions without exposing passwords. That is the single biggest reason to use GPOs to deploy scripts, because they give you that exact ability!
Probably someone that doesn't realize that you can SSH into a Windows box just like you can with a Linux box. And beyond that, group policies can be configured to call scripts and custom MSI installers so they really aren't limited in any meaningful way.
There have always been people that reject any policy driven environment because they take a lot of work to do well but that work is only initially and then also scales to unprecedented magnitudes.
I agree, as someone that runs two data centers that are both hot and both independently capable of handling the company load I think it is still wise for a scaled back DR at yet another location. For me it's as simple as a tier 3 storage server with a 100tb tape library backing things up properly. This gives me email archiving and records compliance. Of course the tapes aren't stored at the DR site.
The problem is that there is no effective limit to how much redundancy you can have. The industry default in my experience is N+1 or normally 3 redundant systems which I'm fortunate enough to have because I put on live events around the country. We have onsite redundancy, two racks physically split up but connected via fiber for synchronization. Failure of one rack results in the switch mesh directing the remaining traffic to the secondary rack. Beyond that I have a direct fiber connection back to our HQ where I have another copy of everything, usually about 1 hour behind so a sudden data incident such as CEO deleting 200 gigs of marketing data can be easily recovered with a minimal impact. Of course in that scenario had I not been present both live sites would have deleted the data and then you have to go back to snapshots if you're lucky and have ponied up for proper storage or you have to go back to tape.
DR is necessary for any company that relies on technology and having access to data to make money. For the company I work for both are critically necessary so you see a large investment in redundancy but we try to attack the most vulnerable areas first. When I started we were running on two servers, one was a database server, the other was a file/print server. If either one died our event would come to a halt. To make matters even more lovely you have a 50/50 chance of the database server RAID array spinning up correctly on boot up. First thing I did was double the server count to create two clusters. Later we moved to a webservice so things got even more interesting. Now I'm up to 16 servers that I bring with me and looking to cut it in half with XenServer and some Proliant SLs that give me good density without ridiculous power requirements. Life is better when you're not relying on luck for anything.
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It's also important to note the difference between LTS and 10 release. If you want stable you stick with LTS. This has been the case for at least as long as I've been an Ubuntu user. The thing that pisses me off to no end is that pain you have to go through to get a xen kernel on Ubuntu which makes it a pain in the ass to install in VM on XenServer. Ended up creating PV VM, using a Debian kernel, and then creating a VM template. So when I create a new VM I resize the disk to be what I need. Of course there are other errors, tcpdump and dhclient on my Ubuntu server installs seems to error on bootup with Debian but fortunately for me, it's a server so I just removed dhclient. Probably just going to remove AppArmor too since that seems to be causing the tcpdump error. A lot of effort just for a PV setup when it all works by default with Windows. Of course SUSE, Fedora, CentOS all work fine with their regular installers.
You'd have to be of the crowd that leaves the basement to go and party or travel. I love my netbook, working in wiring closets is a breeze now and 10+ hours of battery life means that I can keep documentation up to date as the majority of my job is setting up temporary infrastructure. Anyone that is mobile a lot will appreciate a netbook.
That's because you're using the 32bit version. The 32bit version of Vista is terrible as well. Windows 7 also starts out slow but as you use your computer it gets noticeably faster, much the same way as Vista and is honestly why Vista generated so much negative PR. Most people when evaluating the OS don't evaluate it for long enough to get a true feel for it. After a couple months now with Windows 7 at home I can say that it is quite a bit faster than the initial install and certainly faster than XP was. Of course with a quad core processor and enough ram to make life good, let's face it, both were fast.
The question is, why are you running 32bit Win7 on a machine that can run 64bit Win7?
This is the same argument those dialup users used when they said they didn't want broadband. The reality is that they don't understand what they are missing.
A 12 year old computer will have very limited capabilities and while it can be used for things like writing papers its more or less just a glorified type-writer. People would be missing out on a lot of what the web has to offer running such old machines. After 4 years most people I see will buy a new computer and pass the old one on to one of the wee ones. Some go as far as 8 years back but at that stage full screen flash is out of the question and at some point waiting for every little thing ruins the fun of computing.
Course I ran an Athlon 750 until last year when it finally died. It's only limitation was anything video related. A new video card can only do so much without the rest of the system feeding it faster. The good news is that people are throwing out old machines less and less so the poor can benefit that way.
The sad part is that most people weren't buying new machines to run the latest OS, they were buying new machines that weren't so cluttered with crap because most people lack basic organizational skills. Since Microsoft took so long coming out with a product after XP they missed that train of the 9x era where people did upgrade their machines just for the latest OS because it gave them new abilities. Now the focus on Windows isn't in new functionality but in making existing functionality more accessible to users.
Ubuntu has lacked a lot of what desktop users expect and the inconsistencies are something that turn off a lot of users. I run Ubuntu and the latest kernel upgrade killed the ability for network manager to manage my network card. As opposed to another kernel update which broke the network card of my aspire one. It was working using the stock kernel and then I had to run out and get a kernel patch so I could use some wired networking fun. These are not issues Windows users typically encounter.
The owner of the company I work for uses it to raise and drop his tv from the floor, gate control, then of course drapes and PTZ manuevering.
Really sucks if you have a power outage and you can't open your drapes or your gate. Of course the gate at least has a manual release.
You're right about Creston programming though. Seem to be more bad programmers than good ones, much like the rest of the development world.
Again, warrantless wiretapping was illegal and it was up to congress to enforce such laws that the executive was breaking. Of course not only did they not prosecute but they changed the law to make it legal in certain cases despite there being perfectly good oversight processes that don't endanger lives.
The president can't introduce legislation which is why bad laws start with congress and it would be up to the president to veto them. There was very little political will to fight with the president because of the whole Clinton debacle which was the last time congress was vaguely doing their job even if it was barking up a ridiculous tree in my opinion. They were at least investigating the allegations that something illegal was going on.
As for unemployment with ridiculous high turn-over, I think you fail to understand what happens when you lose your job. People will tide themselves over for a few weeks or months if they were smart and saw it coming but few have that kind of savings and they overinvested in houses they can't afford and made all sorts of other stupid investments, they lost their income, are now saddled with debt and the new job is paying them less and that's all if they manage to keep the new job. Even on top of that, it takes months to recover from unemployment so if you get laid off of your new job within six months you are now bumped into poverty in a lot of cases.
Of course this hasn't happened to me, just many people I know from all parts of this country except for the mid-west and Vermont since people seem to be fiscally more responsible in those areas. There most of course are exceptions to that rule.
High turnover also shows the overall state of businesses, if all businesses are needing to lay off employees then you have a coming tidal wave of depression. Across the board you see companies shrinking their staffing as much as possible. This is why I do the work of 10 IT guys, they refuse to hire help because they need to maintain certain levels of liquidity. Fortunately for me it does mean a level of job security seldom seen in the industry right now.
The bottom line is that Americans are going to have to learn to be more thrifty, a talent they used to have and something that has lost a lot of value over the last couple decades.
Of course it doesn't hurt when the president sends a message to the people saying that credit will solve all our problems. I like the thought process of doing the exact same things that got us into the mess and then hoping that will fix the problem.
Sounds like you're describing Crestron since all the functionality you mention you can find in a Crestron home or office. The owner of the company I work for is all about it even though it's overpriced crap. I think you're right about why it hasn't taken off though, that licensing has kept it all prohibitively expensive but more importantly if the power goes out living in your house is miserable and the robotics break a lot. When the quality and logistics get worked out better you'll find it in more homes.
Is a failure to fix a broken program any different than creating the program yourself? Obviously Bush agreed with it and so he did nothing.
Let us also keep in mind that it was passed under a heavily republican congress. I'm so sick of everyone blaming the president for crap congress was doing or not doing. If congress had been doing it's job through both Clinton and Bush years then we wouldn't be in this mess. They are too corrupt and spineless for real action. If there was one positive contribution by Bush's administration it was that action can happen regardless of congressional oversight or lack there of. Of course most people view this as a high negative as they should since a major function of congress is to balance out the powers of the president which is a function they even now are unwilling to properly perform.
He left a huge wake of problems behind, much it through broken policies that were already in place and much of it through new policies which degraded our situation fast. The unemployment figures were always doctored and there was too much emphasis on a single number to begin with. Everyone knows someone who got laid off from work due to falling revenues. Who cares if 10 million are out of work now if a different 10 million are out of work the next week? The rate is the same but the number of people affected is much higher.
I hear you on the not wanting to blame everything on Bush when there is plenty of blame to go around. Even though I hate the man and all of his policies, blind, rabid, reactionary politics won't get us anywhere pleasant.
Let me get this straight; you like iTunes but it has a lot of usability issues for you? Why do you like iTunes? Sounds to me like you think it's a piece of crap like the rest of us because you've actually used it but somehow because it's an Apple product that it's still an okay product? I don't understand this mentality and a lot of people share especially when it comes to the iPod and the crap users put up with. My father's Ipod froze up on him, he had to browse the web to find a way to fix it. I'd never seen an mp3 player freeze up before then. Why do people put up with an inferior product? At least with the ipod I kinda get it with the iTunes store back before there weren't really any legal alternatives. Itunes always sucked though and probably always will. Just use Winamp on Windows or Rhythmbox on Ubuntu or whatever other media player you like, they are pretty much all better than iTunes.
Windows 7 is the best OS I've used in years!
Actually no, when you reboot you still have previous backups. Windows keeps several registry backups in several files so you can always restore whatever is broken. This is the Windows XP or greater area of course. That is of course on top of system restore which can retain many backups by default depending on how much installing and uninstalling you are doing.
Registry hacks are not friendly for regular folk which is why it is so discouraged and is the same reason that editing text files is considered unfriendly. Modifying fstab is far from friendly especially if you are new to the world. Yeah it gets easy when you realize everything is a file and certain consistencies expose themselves but for the new people it is highly inaccessible exactly like the registry. The only difference is that Microsoft does all it can to prevent you from having to go in and manually edit anything. This is why a patch was created enabling the disable and uninstall functions.
You're right that the registry is a great place to high malware as much of it is not very well documented. I can't imagine why any application developer would want to use it.
The original question mentioned products that performed this task so no, they aren't out of luck. Bonding WAN links into a super circuit is something we've been doing for years as remote sites simply can't get the level of bandwidth that I have at HQ. HQ has a gig Internet connection, some events I put on are in areas where I can get 3meg DSL. I ended up bonding 8 DSLs and 4 T1s just to get enough bandwidth to function since I stream live video during out event and we use SIP trunking for all phone calls the Internet is pretty important to us. Ecessa, then Astrocom presented the only affordable option as all the rest were at least an order of magnitude more expensive.
The only requirement is that you have devices on both ends to handle the out of order traffic and to manage latency across links. This can all be done with BGP if you are experienced in the realm of networking or it can be done with Ecessa Powerlink or Fat Pipe's offerings if you want a point and click simple solution because some of us would rather devote our time elsewhere than complicating our routing tables with BGP. Two Cisco routers wtih HSRP or HP layer 3 switches with XRRP and you can have a fully redundant solution though.
I think you missed the point as the question wasn't about having multiple WAN connections, that's easy, it was about bonding those connections so they are one big pipe. I'm sure there are products out there that will allow you to do it with Linux, I know there are BGP routers available that could handle the bonding necessary. Of course Ecessa is a less problematic approach as it's clustered and pretty easy to use right out of the box. I use them to bond 12 Internet connections in Florida when I do an event down there because I can't seem to get more than crap for bandwidth. On the other end I have optical Internet at gig speeds so it's pretty straight forward as long as you have clustered units on both ends.
WAN load balancing is relatively new and can still be very expensive to do properly. Ecessa was the first to do it affordably for small businesses. Of course I started using them when they were Astrocom. Ran into some VLAN funky behavior but once you get it working you set it and forget it and any approach that is that hands off is okay by me since I'm busy deploying enough switches to give hundreds Internet access for a 4 day event.
Very few ISPs will support you, you should never rely on a 3rd party providing a special service for you when you can load balance it yourself with two cisco routers using BGP or with Ecessa Powerlinks should your budget be constrained like mine was. Then you don't have to worry about what the hopefully various ISPs that you use support.
If I provisioned secondary services and let them sit idle then accounting would report it and then I wouldn't have a secondary link anymore. I have Ecessa WAN Load balancers and they get the job done on the cheap compared to the alternatives I researched from Fat Pipe for instance. I put on a show that requires real-time streaming of video among many other Internet features required to perform. The only Internet I can get is 3meg DSL which hurts at that location. Every other location I can get optical Internet on the cheap. My last show I had 150meg of bandwidth and life was good. The load balancers are clustered per site, you'll have to have units on both ends to coordinate packet transmission as others have noted, latency among links can cause responsiveness problems. Fortunately the load balancer takes care of that allowing me to set thresholds and prioritize traffic.
Not only do I have redundant transparent Internet connections but I can use all the bandwidth as I see fit making it easier to justify the expense of service which for us is temporary. The only problem I ran into was with our SIP phones pass-thru port as it would put workstations on another VLAN. Something about how it handles the traffic requires me to connect another cable to the load balancer and feed the VLAN directly instead of using the trunk port. All said and done it was pretty easy to deploy though.
In my case I make sure I have multiple static IP addresses, should the load balancer experience some failure my firewall will detect the failure and route directly advertising a working link via OSPF. The cost is higher so the link only gets used by my main router if the load balancer becomes unavailable. Automatic fault tolerance is a beautiful thing when you make 80% of your money for the year in 7 days.
I have to disagree with your statement about popularity. If the majority of people didn't trust MS they wouldn't keep deploying it. That means that MS hasn't violated the trust of the majority and quite frankly, no one can please everyone.
While I agree that Microsoft shouldn't be trusted I understand that the majority of businesses out there do trust MS and only use basic functionality which in the Windows world simply works. Those of us that try to do unique things run into problems so we like flexible solutions so we ended trying alternatives and become Linux users. I think you would be hard pressed to come up with protocol busting behavior from MS beyond that of IE functionality which at the time all browsers were doing. Remember Netscape 4 and the lovely behavior it gave us? MS was just playing following the leader and since they had a nice install base surprise surprise, they came out on top. NTLM v1 was long considered a bad idea and v2 was clearly an improvement from a security standpoint. Could they have made it more interoperable? Probably but how much should they spend on it? At what point does breaking compatibility make the most sense? Apple does it just fine rather routinely and without backlash but MS seems to get blasted as untrustworthy for the exact same behavior so I say the popularity does determine trustworthiness.
That is precisely what you get with Citrix XenServer combined with Citrix Essentials, there are many other products for Xen that give you everything that Amazon is offering including virtual switches and load balancers.
When I want new instances I just spawn new instances and it will take care of provisioning storage for me. I'll grant it's not as slick but there is no reason to call it the cloud when all it does is virtualize all your infrastructure. You're not using any new software on the back-end to create your cloud. In short, it's just people trying to push software as a service by hiding technical details so businesses won't just build their own. Given how expensive I've seen some EC2 setups I can see how many businesses would rather just build their own once they are of sufficient size. For small businesses it's probably a great way to deploy since virtual infrastructure for small businesses is still sorely lacking due to licensing costs from all the major players or in the case of Microsoft, the straight lack of features.
Takes about 10 seconds and happens without dropping so much as a packet. Of course that will depend on your back-end storage. I'm fortunate enough to run with NetApp though so it's all gravy. On a side-note, Citrix Essentials for XenServer is pretty cool with their SAN integration technology. Thin-provisioning on the fly is the way to be! When I make a storage repository it is 20megs until I create a VM and even then it will only take up space that is actually taken up. Combined with volume level deduplication and you have yourself a pretty efficient environment. Just wish people would stop calling it a cloud.
Then why is it that the girl's machines are usually the sticky ones? Is that so bad then? Course I'm fortunate, all the girls that work here are HOT!
No, the problem is all the administrators that think editing a few text files or clicking a few buttons in a GUi is all that is involved.
All the people that think creating a user on any platform makes them an admin. There are too many IT people that got into it for the money and they are clearly still around as I'm sure you can see from other posts on this article. People who are passionate will go above and beyond and create unique and easy to manage solutions where those fake admins will kludge solutions together that either won't scale, are terrible from a security perspective, or simply too difficult for staff to actually use. I see this in the networking world all the time and I see it in the programming world all the time.
MS just enabled idiots to perform most of the small functions without actually learning what they are doing. From my perspective it's great as the small stuff I can do very fast very efficiently. The harder more advanced stuff like data management requires a much deeper understanding of how systems interact and that's where you separate interns from admins.
I was referring more to countries like North Korea or Syria, or Lebanon. Iran while a relatively larger country from a land mass perspective isn't that large in terms of population centers. Hit a big city and expect fall-out to hurt Israel let alone our troops on the ground in Iraq. Combined with contaminated water supply and even Egypt could see large scale ecological devastation.
My only point is that you can't use the weapons without hurting your friends. This is why most modern military funding is in the realm of conventional weaponry and why it's so scary that radical nations would achieve this level of sophistication without learning the lessons that we did. Modern countries see nukes as a way of leveling the playing field forgetting that our conventional weaponry far surpasses them. You need only look back a year or so with the super cavitating torpedoes. The U.S. Navy wasn't impressed because the Russians developed it 20 years ago and we've long since developed defenses for such things. As a result they will never gain technologically superiority as they are trying to play catch up to a country a few decades ahead of them. Concentrating on fighting wars the way they used to be fought isn't likely to lead anywhere pleasant for any modern power as they adjusted their tactics for good reason. Nuclear weapons are not practical nor politically advantageous to actually use. Countries that don't understand that will put innocent people in harms way.
Of course people can argue over whether or not the American population is considered innocent. That's another debate though.
Of course you need to keep in mind that obliterating every city in say Russia would cause horrific conditions for China and anyone down wind from radiation. Same with any country that is sufficiently leveled using nuclear weapons. In short, everyone loses including the people that did the firing regardless of counter strike or not. That's the problem with tiny countries getting nukes, if they were to fire you couldn't fire back without significantly harming your allies.
Install powershell, or openssh, why am I not allowed to use cygwin? I don't need cygwin anyways as powershell is quite capable on all Windows from XP on up which covers that last 8 years pretty much.
The only remote administration that does impact a user is RDP, all other things from remote registry to installing applications in the background can be down without the users knowledge.
Also, scripts can run with elevated permissions without exposing passwords. That is the single biggest reason to use GPOs to deploy scripts, because they give you that exact ability!
Probably someone that doesn't realize that you can SSH into a Windows box just like you can with a Linux box. And beyond that, group policies can be configured to call scripts and custom MSI installers so they really aren't limited in any meaningful way.
There have always been people that reject any policy driven environment because they take a lot of work to do well but that work is only initially and then also scales to unprecedented magnitudes.
I agree, as someone that runs two data centers that are both hot and both independently capable of handling the company load I think it is still wise for a scaled back DR at yet another location. For me it's as simple as a tier 3 storage server with a 100tb tape library backing things up properly. This gives me email archiving and records compliance. Of course the tapes aren't stored at the DR site.
The problem is that there is no effective limit to how much redundancy you can have. The industry default in my experience is N+1 or normally 3 redundant systems which I'm fortunate enough to have because I put on live events around the country. We have onsite redundancy, two racks physically split up but connected via fiber for synchronization. Failure of one rack results in the switch mesh directing the remaining traffic to the secondary rack. Beyond that I have a direct fiber connection back to our HQ where I have another copy of everything, usually about 1 hour behind so a sudden data incident such as CEO deleting 200 gigs of marketing data can be easily recovered with a minimal impact. Of course in that scenario had I not been present both live sites would have deleted the data and then you have to go back to snapshots if you're lucky and have ponied up for proper storage or you have to go back to tape.
DR is necessary for any company that relies on technology and having access to data to make money. For the company I work for both are critically necessary so you see a large investment in redundancy but we try to attack the most vulnerable areas first. When I started we were running on two servers, one was a database server, the other was a file/print server. If either one died our event would come to a halt. To make matters even more lovely you have a 50/50 chance of the database server RAID array spinning up correctly on boot up. First thing I did was double the server count to create two clusters. Later we moved to a webservice so things got even more interesting. Now I'm up to 16 servers that I bring with me and looking to cut it in half with XenServer and some Proliant SLs that give me good density without ridiculous power requirements. Life is better when you're not relying on luck for anything.