If you don't understand why the start menu is the way it is, especially for Vista its because you're not used to policy driven desktops. Does regular users need access to the control panel? Hell no! But when I login to install some piece of software or to do some hardware diagnostics I damn well better have access to do it and giving me access from the start menu is good for the people that are more comfortable with a mouse. I use use hotkeys personally, but not everyone out there does.
Vista's new screens are 100% policy driven, there is no aspect of it you can't control from my administrative station. I think policy driven environments are vastly superior in terms of useability than having individual desktops like is usually seen in OS X and Linux environments. Security can be argued here but since the users have the least amount of privileges needed that risk is minimized although certainly still exists.
As for your ludicrous assumptions that it doesn't matter what is running and what isn't. Another poster responded that quite nicely. Even everyday Linux desktops will tell you what is open and what isn't cause it indeed does matter. I've seen OS X machines eating up 6gigs of ram doing nothing just because all kinds of apps were open and the user had no idea. The machine had 8gigs of ram in it so the effect was minimal to the user but most don't have that much memory. Combine that with the fact that you have to click on this Apple logo just to shut the thing down. Sure its based on Unix, you shouldn't ever have to shut it down, except when of course its getting hot in the room or you're leaving for two weeks. No need to waste the electricity. The G5 tower puts our a surprising amount of heat but of course, thats a different issue.
See the other post for other start menu options that apply more to home users. Powershell is option in Vista just like most components in it.
The boys at WindowBlinds might have something to say about that.
Sorry but Windows is a lot more intuitive. One of my old teachers went to China to teach kids computers. He sat them at a computer with Windows and Office. With minimal instruction the kids could easily find there way around and start typing a document. Pretty soon they found solitaire and the likes without instruction, sorry but the Start button makes sense especially compared to the OS X world. The dock has its issues such as figuring which applications are open versus which ones are available to open. KDE and Gnome both use symbols for their menus which most people wouldn't recognize as something to click on.
As for the "Windows Way," What exactly did you find backwards? I'm curious... I've been a student of multiple platforms for years so other prospectives are great when I have to recommend a platform for a project.
The constitution is not just a document, it is the foundation for the law of this country. The checks and balances created to ensure that it remains the rule of law seem to be failing miserably these days. It will take education of the masses to make them realize what is happening. It is not the erosion of rights but the granting of powers to the government that it cannot and should not have.
Unfortunately the media on all sides seems to have forgotten what reporting is all about, seems like you have to read blogs out there to get straight information without opinions being shoved down your throat. The media is the powerful polarizing tool. Unless a person has millions of dollars to spread the word it cannot effectively be communicated to the people that matter. So people that disagree have to stand up and say something in the hopes of finding someone with the resources who agrees. It starts in places like these but yes, come election time I'm gonna have to get out and spread the word as much as I can just like I did around the last election.
Probably didn't make a big impact but its worth trying.
I wish you the best of luck in your endeavor to find massive public outcry. I really do, it would be nice to see a mass of people stand up and call out the governments involved stating just how ludicrous this is. Of course I don't think it'll happen since I'm fairly certain EU citizens are just as complacent in this regard.
I'm plain dumbfounded at the erosion of our "inalienable rights" The constitution here in the U.S. seems to have changed from a document which limits the power of government to something new which I cannot yet define. That scares the hell of out me.
Perhaps the people of the EU can shine a better light on the issue than we have. I know everywhere I go I can't find anything that likes the idea of the NSA listening and more importantly recording every phone call and every email. The whole concept flies in the face of the constitution. Why should I be monitored when I've done nothing wrong? It's a waste of resources and its far too open to abuse.
The sad thing with all this data retention crap is that it will only make it more difficult to identify terrorists. It leads to an encryption war making the system more complicated and thus less reliable but also makes more people aware of the need for encryption. Probably a good thing from a personal privacy point of view, certainly bad if you're trying to find terrorists.
I also feel bad for all those ISPs in the EU that are required to log everything now for six months at that. That is potentially a mind bogglingly huge amount of data that every company will have to store. Thankfully this is not a requirement in the U.S. 30 days is the limit for most ISPs and their logs aren't very detailed. I think about the amount of transfer I do in a month like January, thats about 90tb at the very least and thats just my one domain. Lotta records for very little gain if any.
How exactly is clustering any different from Microsofts approach? Are you confusing Microsofts implementation of Network Load Balancing with Clustering? Clustering has and always has been about high availability which means uptime AND performance. Windows clustering gives you both, so what are they doing thats so wrong again?
Now, what business these days do you think doesn't run their services 24/7? I can tell you that we do, and we do it on Exchange. Reboots aren't noticed because the infrastructure was planned appropriately. I am one guy managing 20 servers along with all our workstations and I even still have time to troubleshoot printers and organize new business deals for more services to provide. You do seem to be an old school unix guy thinking that things haven't changed over the last 6 to 10 years. Well guess what, they have whether you want to believe it or not. Now with that said your presumption that maintenance is not required on linux is just plain ludicrous. We run SUSE Enterprise Linux here for our Oracle backend servers and guess what? I get updates in my email everyday, not one but several on most days. How is this different from Microsofts current environment? Maintenance is not an option, it should be scheduled and infrastructure should be designed to withstand hardware failure which inherently means that software can screw up without affecting the end user. This is especially true in a 24/7 environment. So with a properly created infrastructure how is a reboot disruptive to the end user at all? Neither my SUSE setups nor my Windows setups give the end user even the slightest hint that something is happening which is great cause I can do maintenance during the day now!
I'll also take your bet that you can create a user with an appropriate policy and access controls as well as create them an email box, provide them with faxing abilities or any combination there of in less time than I can using Active Directory Users and Computers. All the automation you get in your scripts I get in my organizational units and oh yes, my own scripts! Sorry, its not easier, there is a reason you don't see General Mills or the Amazons of the world using OpenLDAP for their directory services. Now Novell with e-Directory, thats another story of course it does relate to Linux. It's got the ease of use angle on it albeit, AD is still easier and usually cheaper. I love Novell though so I won't fault anyone for using it. Tis where I grew up. I guess I'm a little sentimental.
Just means you need more mirror space, or a mirror in the shower for shaving, most importantly you need a shower big enough for two;)
Of course both his and hers bathrooms had walk-in closets, the hers closet had two giant chandliers in them while the mens was more modest but still utterly over the top.
Way to bash without actually providing any insight into a better option. Your view would leave the IT world ot fend for itself which may be working for you now but how about when carpal tunnel screws up your hands so you can't type? What about when you lift that 250lbs storage array into the rack and slip a disc? Do you think all the benefits there would have been provided without the unions of the past? Unions give employees the power to protect themselves. Company removing health benefits for you and your family? Unions could stop that real quick. I don't have a family but I can easily see a situation where I might have to rely on something like that in the future, I'd like to have the option. Despite what some think, when you have children, get a house and whatnot you can't just quit your job unless you've saved up quite a sum of money which is rather difficult to do unless earning more than a modest income. I know plenty of network engineers, webmaster, adminstrators, both database and network that are making around 40,000 a year. Is that enough to feed and clothes two kids, provide a roof over their head and ensure they can go to college? Maybe, barely at best. Even double that saying the other partner is making the same which considering the medium income in the country and you're still a tight fit.
So yes, give us some protection, don't legislate it, let us take the power we already have and utilize it better. Build an organization with its own checks and balances with modest and more importantly clear goals. I don't see how you can be so hostile to this idea. Exactly which ludicrous ideas screwed over GM? Which ludicrous ideas screwed over the steel industry? In every situation what was competition like with other companies from other countries? What was the cost savings they enjoyed by locating themselves domestically?
Except we're talking about new deployments, not test beds, not current deployments, deployments in the near future. Why would they be using older technology? Also as I stated in several other posts the way our ISP is doing is on a much smaller scale. Done at each substation, they run fiber to the substation and attach the gateway to the powerlines. It's a smaller segment causing fewer problems. So just because YOU have problems with CURRENT deployments does not mean others will have problems with NEW deployments. So I'm sorry, but it is fud. The people that live in the city should make sure that the power utilities are using equipment that will cause the least number of problems rather than shooting it down outright just because of bad experience in the past.
million dollar homes are usually wired and easy to add new wiring to. Starry-eyed I'm not, I'd never spend that much on a house. I was baffled why the master bathroom would have his and hers showers. Seems to me like I'd want them to be one shower for obvious reasons.
Basically its all about spending money because you have it, when thats the case you'd expect them to be a little less short-sighted when they are spending THAT much money.
Except we're talking about new implementations of new technology of which the bsod isn't prevalent;) For that matter, its been years since I've seen a bad magic number on a linux boot as well. Crash/Error handling has come a long way on all platforms. Nothing is perfect but at least all sides seem to be working on it.
Last I checked we were discussing new deployments which would be with new technology. So again, why is the fud about stuff in the past being spread now muddying the waters needlessly?
The first cars didn't work either, the first computers worked for shit. At what point do people stop relying on past implementations to avoid evaluating current implementations based on different technology? It's like all those blue screen of death jokes you see when they haven't been prevalent in more than 6 years. At some point you gotta say stop, look at it and evaluate it for what it is not what it was. Imagine if we all did that with Linux at kernel 1.2? It never would have gotten off the ground and then where would we be?
A hosting company has chosen to locate some of their management servers at his house, so they pay for electricity and business DSL. He's doing alright for now. Maybe over the summer he'll see about setting something up.
I would suggest you look at Corinex in particular, at 200megabit it doesn't cause any major interference. For that matter, here in Peoria we have a broad scale deployment of BOPL and considering my coworker is a ham enthusiast in the same town I find it odd that this fud is still being spread around. He's got no issues within a mile of the thing nor has the telecom company doing all the work had any issues reported to them. They are one of our sponsors so we generally talk to the people who would know. It makes sense that rf over the power lines would get amplified greatly but in practice it doesn't happen especially when you do it right at each substation. Our ISP runs fiber to each substation and then attached more or less a gateway that connects the fiber to the power lines.
There is a BOPL deployment here in Arizona, Peoria more specifically and the radios work just fine. I'm a little confused where that idea came from. My coworker is a ham radio operator and guess what? He lives in Peoria about a mile from where they located their testbed. Boy was he pissed since its 200megabit. He begged our ISP to expand it a little more so he could get it. Our ISP is one of our sponsors so we actually have a bit of pull. Only problem was there was no fiber connecting his substation so they couldn't do it easily.
Dang, don't see many fellow Vermonters on here. Last I remembered Green Mountain Power wasn't city owned. I've been away for about 5 years so things may have changed. I do recall that there were strict pricing controls. Vermont has a lot of fiber in it already though so I wouldn't be surprised if they just got a really good deal on all the equipment. Connecting all the major cities of New England takes a lot of glass and thats good for VT! I remember getting DSL in the push back in 1996 and when I moved to AZ in 2001 I was very confused at the lack of high speed service. Fortunately we've caught up here a bit.
We have a small telecom company as a sponsor of ours, they are doing BOPL in this area at 200megabit to the house! Check out Corinex and you'll see this technology isn't theory anymore. We are using this technology to create a LAN at my boss's new multi-million dollar house. Well, its new to him, the problem is there is no wiring for network so we're using power adapters to hook up wireless access points as well as connect a few computers. The result is a fast network which even supports VLANs!
The technology is almost cheap too at $200 for a pair of adapters. Makes a great way to connect two disparate rooms in a house without having to get our your remote controlled car and tie some cable to it, then put it in the ac duct.
And great job totally missing the point. The poster was illustrating the faulty logic of the grandparent. Unions didn't kill the steel industry or the auto industry. They were mis-managed and demand dropped for American cars. That is the reason they are going under. The construction industry has been unionized for a long time and you don't see those companies going under unless demand falls off. Unions are just easy to blame because they do indeed contribute to the cost of doing business. However, they do protect the rights of the employees.
Everyone seems to think that a new union would have to have all the same problems with older unions. This is curious why everyone thinks that an IT union would have to be run like all the others. If you don't want to be dragged down by lazy or shoddy tech workers then don't let them into the union! Problem solved, you can have evaluations at given intervals to maintain status in the union. Collective bargaining has a lot of power to reverse dangerous trends, of course it can also cause harm. That is why you make sure the ones you put at the top of the union know what they are doing.
I do find it sad how so many people forget about the history surrounding unions in the early 1900's. They did an awful lot of good and yes, a lot of them went overboard, a product of mismanagement easily solved by people being more active in their own organizations. Just like all the people complaining about Bush that didn't even vote.
haha, sorry, but ease of use is one of the reasons many businesses use Windows still and will continue to. As for OS X I'll go out on a limb and suggest you haven't had to administer more than 10 OS X machines. Where is the policy support? Where is central patch management? Where is central software management? Yes, all are available but we're talking about ease of use. SMS and MOM on the Microsoft side are far easier to use than at least any of the OSS implementations I've seen for Linux or OS X.
Novell, yep, they are still around and they are one exception to the linux table. E-Directory and Xen products will manage most anything so they probably rank at the top of the heap but they are indeed costly still and getting local support for them is difficult.
I'm sorry but Windows for many businesses small and large is still the best option from frontend services. Linux is working out great for here with Oracle. We run SUSE Enterprise for AMD64 along with 64-bit Oracle 10g. It's slick. I wanted to run Gentoo on them but getting Oracle support on a Gentoo box is kind of difficult and when push comes to shove I need my database supported!
That said, for the desktop, home users will chat, they will use webcams, they will digital cameras and camcorders, they'll use scanners. Hell, a lot of business users will use all of this, most of them just plain don't have support for Linux, although a lot of them support OS X which has come a long way but it still needs to learn how to play with others. File-sharing both NFS and SMB support on OS X seems to be terribly shakey especially with any form of encryption in the way. Of course its backend makes it endlessly configurable but thats not easy now is it?
A lot scriptable but that adds to setup time and complicates changes to the environment, we pick up half the network for instance and go to auction. With SMS and DFS all users crossover seemlessly without me having to even visit them. The auction infrastructure is setup in a day and scales out three times the size of headquarters. I'd call that easy!
That said, I'll add its all about administration. A good linux admin which I'll admit I'm mediocre at can and probably already has scripts setup to configure all sorts of stuff so to the end user it may all appear seemless but in my experience this sort of shift is hard.
I like the GUI world Windows offers because when I need to do something a little weird its up to me to see where the option is. In the CLI world I have to google the result and copy someone elses script and modify it for my own needs. That doesn't sound easier. Granted archiving log files and Oracle database management tasks are much faster using scripts. Basically look at Linux for what it is and don't delude yourself into thinking its easy. OS X is fairly simple to use but everytime you want to do something a little different you have to struggle and when there's a problem forget about being able to diagnose it from an application error message that may or may not say anything about the problem. I'll point to OS X not being able to talk to an SMB share on a remote subnet. I have to change the ip address to static whenever I move the Macs from subnet to subnet physically. I've seen strange behavior using wireless connections too. If it would tell you why its not working or give you some error other than access denied life would be a lot easier on OS X. Difference in philosophy though, I don't envy an OS X Admin. I'm glad we only have a few here at my company.
Sounds like a poor implementation than a problem with XP Embedded considering the installer gives you the option to strip out practially everything. 256megs of ram isn't even required for XP Pro let alone embedded.
My experience with XP embedded in the kiosks we provide at our auctions is that they are quite reliable and easily locked down provided you set the right policies and don't install stuff that is not needed. Yes, it can be full featured but if its a thin client it makes no sense to do it.
So we agree, it is stupid to run a full featured OS on a thin-client. Boot off a read-only PXE image and be done with it.
Considering out in-house applications and phone system integrate with Exchange we won't be replacing it anytime soon. I did notice a decrease in NDRs sent to us after I published an SPF record. I didn't use Microsoft's wizard so I can't verify whether or not is conforms. I know Gmail reports on my domains status as SPF verified. Took me a few tries to get it going.
I liked the simplicity of it, just have to add a txt record to our nameservers. That's the only problem I was seeing with other solutions, they all required a lot more changes. Of course that only works because software was already modified to read spf records. When DKIM is supported on Exchange I'll go ahead and implement it, I don't really care what standard we use as long as there is a standard since this is utterly rediculous how much spam is sent our way. Sure its all tossed out at the MTA but its still an annoyance especially when so much of the email is malformed so it gets stuck in the gueue.
Flexibility is great, definitely a viable solution for the linux boxes in my world. For windows I'll just use MOM and if the built in reporting isn't enough, its all stored in a SQL backend so its easy to make your own graphs using Excel.
I'll be setting up the linux tools on the db servers, have to find out if it works with Oracle alright.
As for the Windows servers, the monitoring is nothing new, Microsoft Operations Manager or MOM has been around for 6 years now and is exceedingly friendly to both setup and use, also works with all servers and workstations flagging alerts like low disk space or high cpu utilization so you can see if some new virus is coming at you. They even have agents for Linux and OS X.
I'll have to check out rrdtool though, its new to me, most of the linux boxes I have in production are only doing one task and there aren't that many servers. 20 in total that I manage so its fairly easy to check availability and go over the logs real quick manually. Time is always against me but now that its summer I should have time to get my house in order.
Making yourself compliant is only the first step. My name servers have had an spf record for some time now, but if few others support it then its practically useless. So you're right, its not easy, it just makes the most sense of any of the solutions I've seen so far.
That said, relying on any of these solutions at this time is foolish unless you deal in a small amount of email. We deal with hundreds, sometimes thousands of domains and that introduces a lot of headaches especially when our marketing department is communicating with the marketing departments. A lot of their emails look a lot like spam and even a lot of them come from blocked sources. Good thing whitelists exist.
As for SPF, most people I know refer to it as SenderID since it is implemented in Exchange 2003 SP2, a very common mail server in the corporate world. I'll add that there is already a great amount of support for it, I use it to score spam right now, in the future I will reject it based on it but for now it gives me more information about what is coming at me.
I haven't seen an elegant domainkeys solution yet but my new MTAs won't be exchange so I can probably do it just find there.
Seems to me its easier just to use domainkeys and senderID. The problem is standardizing. I can't require either one of them because not enough people are compliant. When that changes the spam world will get simpler until a flaw in the mechanism is found which I believe will lead to an encryption war.
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Vista's new screens are 100% policy driven, there is no aspect of it you can't control from my administrative station. I think policy driven environments are vastly superior in terms of useability than having individual desktops like is usually seen in OS X and Linux environments. Security can be argued here but since the users have the least amount of privileges needed that risk is minimized although certainly still exists.
As for your ludicrous assumptions that it doesn't matter what is running and what isn't. Another poster responded that quite nicely. Even everyday Linux desktops will tell you what is open and what isn't cause it indeed does matter. I've seen OS X machines eating up 6gigs of ram doing nothing just because all kinds of apps were open and the user had no idea. The machine had 8gigs of ram in it so the effect was minimal to the user but most don't have that much memory. Combine that with the fact that you have to click on this Apple logo just to shut the thing down. Sure its based on Unix, you shouldn't ever have to shut it down, except when of course its getting hot in the room or you're leaving for two weeks. No need to waste the electricity. The G5 tower puts our a surprising amount of heat but of course, thats a different issue.See the other post for other start menu options that apply more to home users. Powershell is option in Vista just like most components in it.
Sorry but Windows is a lot more intuitive. One of my old teachers went to China to teach kids computers. He sat them at a computer with Windows and Office. With minimal instruction the kids could easily find there way around and start typing a document. Pretty soon they found solitaire and the likes without instruction, sorry but the Start button makes sense especially compared to the OS X world. The dock has its issues such as figuring which applications are open versus which ones are available to open. KDE and Gnome both use symbols for their menus which most people wouldn't recognize as something to click on.
As for the "Windows Way," What exactly did you find backwards? I'm curious... I've been a student of multiple platforms for years so other prospectives are great when I have to recommend a platform for a project.Unfortunately the media on all sides seems to have forgotten what reporting is all about, seems like you have to read blogs out there to get straight information without opinions being shoved down your throat. The media is the powerful polarizing tool. Unless a person has millions of dollars to spread the word it cannot effectively be communicated to the people that matter. So people that disagree have to stand up and say something in the hopes of finding someone with the resources who agrees. It starts in places like these but yes, come election time I'm gonna have to get out and spread the word as much as I can just like I did around the last election.
Probably didn't make a big impact but its worth trying.I'm plain dumbfounded at the erosion of our "inalienable rights" The constitution here in the U.S. seems to have changed from a document which limits the power of government to something new which I cannot yet define. That scares the hell of out me.
Perhaps the people of the EU can shine a better light on the issue than we have. I know everywhere I go I can't find anything that likes the idea of the NSA listening and more importantly recording every phone call and every email. The whole concept flies in the face of the constitution. Why should I be monitored when I've done nothing wrong? It's a waste of resources and its far too open to abuse.The sad thing with all this data retention crap is that it will only make it more difficult to identify terrorists. It leads to an encryption war making the system more complicated and thus less reliable but also makes more people aware of the need for encryption. Probably a good thing from a personal privacy point of view, certainly bad if you're trying to find terrorists.
I also feel bad for all those ISPs in the EU that are required to log everything now for six months at that. That is potentially a mind bogglingly huge amount of data that every company will have to store. Thankfully this is not a requirement in the U.S. 30 days is the limit for most ISPs and their logs aren't very detailed. I think about the amount of transfer I do in a month like January, thats about 90tb at the very least and thats just my one domain. Lotta records for very little gain if any.Now, what business these days do you think doesn't run their services 24/7? I can tell you that we do, and we do it on Exchange. Reboots aren't noticed because the infrastructure was planned appropriately. I am one guy managing 20 servers along with all our workstations and I even still have time to troubleshoot printers and organize new business deals for more services to provide. You do seem to be an old school unix guy thinking that things haven't changed over the last 6 to 10 years. Well guess what, they have whether you want to believe it or not. Now with that said your presumption that maintenance is not required on linux is just plain ludicrous. We run SUSE Enterprise Linux here for our Oracle backend servers and guess what? I get updates in my email everyday, not one but several on most days. How is this different from Microsofts current environment? Maintenance is not an option, it should be scheduled and infrastructure should be designed to withstand hardware failure which inherently means that software can screw up without affecting the end user. This is especially true in a 24/7 environment. So with a properly created infrastructure how is a reboot disruptive to the end user at all? Neither my SUSE setups nor my Windows setups give the end user even the slightest hint that something is happening which is great cause I can do maintenance during the day now!
I'll also take your bet that you can create a user with an appropriate policy and access controls as well as create them an email box, provide them with faxing abilities or any combination there of in less time than I can using Active Directory Users and Computers. All the automation you get in your scripts I get in my organizational units and oh yes, my own scripts! Sorry, its not easier, there is a reason you don't see General Mills or the Amazons of the world using OpenLDAP for their directory services. Now Novell with e-Directory, thats another story of course it does relate to Linux. It's got the ease of use angle on it albeit, AD is still easier and usually cheaper. I love Novell though so I won't fault anyone for using it. Tis where I grew up. I guess I'm a little sentimental.Of course both his and hers bathrooms had walk-in closets, the hers closet had two giant chandliers in them while the mens was more modest but still utterly over the top.
So yes, give us some protection, don't legislate it, let us take the power we already have and utilize it better. Build an organization with its own checks and balances with modest and more importantly clear goals. I don't see how you can be so hostile to this idea. Exactly which ludicrous ideas screwed over GM? Which ludicrous ideas screwed over the steel industry? In every situation what was competition like with other companies from other countries? What was the cost savings they enjoyed by locating themselves domestically?
Except we're talking about new deployments, not test beds, not current deployments, deployments in the near future. Why would they be using older technology? Also as I stated in several other posts the way our ISP is doing is on a much smaller scale. Done at each substation, they run fiber to the substation and attach the gateway to the powerlines. It's a smaller segment causing fewer problems. So just because YOU have problems with CURRENT deployments does not mean others will have problems with NEW deployments. So I'm sorry, but it is fud. The people that live in the city should make sure that the power utilities are using equipment that will cause the least number of problems rather than shooting it down outright just because of bad experience in the past.
Basically its all about spending money because you have it, when thats the case you'd expect them to be a little less short-sighted when they are spending THAT much money.
Except we're talking about new implementations of new technology of which the bsod isn't prevalent ;) For that matter, its been years since I've seen a bad magic number on a linux boot as well. Crash/Error handling has come a long way on all platforms. Nothing is perfect but at least all sides seem to be working on it.
Last I checked we were discussing new deployments which would be with new technology. So again, why is the fud about stuff in the past being spread now muddying the waters needlessly?
The first cars didn't work either, the first computers worked for shit. At what point do people stop relying on past implementations to avoid evaluating current implementations based on different technology? It's like all those blue screen of death jokes you see when they haven't been prevalent in more than 6 years. At some point you gotta say stop, look at it and evaluate it for what it is not what it was. Imagine if we all did that with Linux at kernel 1.2? It never would have gotten off the ground and then where would we be?
A hosting company has chosen to locate some of their management servers at his house, so they pay for electricity and business DSL. He's doing alright for now. Maybe over the summer he'll see about setting something up.
I would suggest you look at Corinex in particular, at 200megabit it doesn't cause any major interference. For that matter, here in Peoria we have a broad scale deployment of BOPL and considering my coworker is a ham enthusiast in the same town I find it odd that this fud is still being spread around. He's got no issues within a mile of the thing nor has the telecom company doing all the work had any issues reported to them. They are one of our sponsors so we generally talk to the people who would know. It makes sense that rf over the power lines would get amplified greatly but in practice it doesn't happen especially when you do it right at each substation. Our ISP runs fiber to each substation and then attached more or less a gateway that connects the fiber to the power lines.
There is a BOPL deployment here in Arizona, Peoria more specifically and the radios work just fine. I'm a little confused where that idea came from. My coworker is a ham radio operator and guess what? He lives in Peoria about a mile from where they located their testbed. Boy was he pissed since its 200megabit. He begged our ISP to expand it a little more so he could get it. Our ISP is one of our sponsors so we actually have a bit of pull. Only problem was there was no fiber connecting his substation so they couldn't do it easily.
Dang, don't see many fellow Vermonters on here. Last I remembered Green Mountain Power wasn't city owned. I've been away for about 5 years so things may have changed. I do recall that there were strict pricing controls. Vermont has a lot of fiber in it already though so I wouldn't be surprised if they just got a really good deal on all the equipment. Connecting all the major cities of New England takes a lot of glass and thats good for VT! I remember getting DSL in the push back in 1996 and when I moved to AZ in 2001 I was very confused at the lack of high speed service. Fortunately we've caught up here a bit.
The technology is almost cheap too at $200 for a pair of adapters. Makes a great way to connect two disparate rooms in a house without having to get our your remote controlled car and tie some cable to it, then put it in the ac duct.
Everyone seems to think that a new union would have to have all the same problems with older unions. This is curious why everyone thinks that an IT union would have to be run like all the others. If you don't want to be dragged down by lazy or shoddy tech workers then don't let them into the union! Problem solved, you can have evaluations at given intervals to maintain status in the union. Collective bargaining has a lot of power to reverse dangerous trends, of course it can also cause harm. That is why you make sure the ones you put at the top of the union know what they are doing.
I do find it sad how so many people forget about the history surrounding unions in the early 1900's. They did an awful lot of good and yes, a lot of them went overboard, a product of mismanagement easily solved by people being more active in their own organizations. Just like all the people complaining about Bush that didn't even vote.Novell, yep, they are still around and they are one exception to the linux table. E-Directory and Xen products will manage most anything so they probably rank at the top of the heap but they are indeed costly still and getting local support for them is difficult.
I'm sorry but Windows for many businesses small and large is still the best option from frontend services. Linux is working out great for here with Oracle. We run SUSE Enterprise for AMD64 along with 64-bit Oracle 10g. It's slick. I wanted to run Gentoo on them but getting Oracle support on a Gentoo box is kind of difficult and when push comes to shove I need my database supported!That said, for the desktop, home users will chat, they will use webcams, they will digital cameras and camcorders, they'll use scanners. Hell, a lot of business users will use all of this, most of them just plain don't have support for Linux, although a lot of them support OS X which has come a long way but it still needs to learn how to play with others. File-sharing both NFS and SMB support on OS X seems to be terribly shakey especially with any form of encryption in the way. Of course its backend makes it endlessly configurable but thats not easy now is it?
A lot scriptable but that adds to setup time and complicates changes to the environment, we pick up half the network for instance and go to auction. With SMS and DFS all users crossover seemlessly without me having to even visit them. The auction infrastructure is setup in a day and scales out three times the size of headquarters. I'd call that easy!That said, I'll add its all about administration. A good linux admin which I'll admit I'm mediocre at can and probably already has scripts setup to configure all sorts of stuff so to the end user it may all appear seemless but in my experience this sort of shift is hard.
I like the GUI world Windows offers because when I need to do something a little weird its up to me to see where the option is. In the CLI world I have to google the result and copy someone elses script and modify it for my own needs. That doesn't sound easier. Granted archiving log files and Oracle database management tasks are much faster using scripts. Basically look at Linux for what it is and don't delude yourself into thinking its easy. OS X is fairly simple to use but everytime you want to do something a little different you have to struggle and when there's a problem forget about being able to diagnose it from an application error message that may or may not say anything about the problem. I'll point to OS X not being able to talk to an SMB share on a remote subnet. I have to change the ip address to static whenever I move the Macs from subnet to subnet physically. I've seen strange behavior using wireless connections too. If it would tell you why its not working or give you some error other than access denied life would be a lot easier on OS X. Difference in philosophy though, I don't envy an OS X Admin. I'm glad we only have a few here at my company.My experience with XP embedded in the kiosks we provide at our auctions is that they are quite reliable and easily locked down provided you set the right policies and don't install stuff that is not needed. Yes, it can be full featured but if its a thin client it makes no sense to do it.
So we agree, it is stupid to run a full featured OS on a thin-client. Boot off a read-only PXE image and be done with it.I liked the simplicity of it, just have to add a txt record to our nameservers. That's the only problem I was seeing with other solutions, they all required a lot more changes. Of course that only works because software was already modified to read spf records. When DKIM is supported on Exchange I'll go ahead and implement it, I don't really care what standard we use as long as there is a standard since this is utterly rediculous how much spam is sent our way. Sure its all tossed out at the MTA but its still an annoyance especially when so much of the email is malformed so it gets stuck in the gueue.
Flexibility is great, definitely a viable solution for the linux boxes in my world. For windows I'll just use MOM and if the built in reporting isn't enough, its all stored in a SQL backend so its easy to make your own graphs using Excel.
As for the Windows servers, the monitoring is nothing new, Microsoft Operations Manager or MOM has been around for 6 years now and is exceedingly friendly to both setup and use, also works with all servers and workstations flagging alerts like low disk space or high cpu utilization so you can see if some new virus is coming at you. They even have agents for Linux and OS X.
I'll have to check out rrdtool though, its new to me, most of the linux boxes I have in production are only doing one task and there aren't that many servers. 20 in total that I manage so its fairly easy to check availability and go over the logs real quick manually. Time is always against me but now that its summer I should have time to get my house in order.That said, relying on any of these solutions at this time is foolish unless you deal in a small amount of email. We deal with hundreds, sometimes thousands of domains and that introduces a lot of headaches especially when our marketing department is communicating with the marketing departments. A lot of their emails look a lot like spam and even a lot of them come from blocked sources. Good thing whitelists exist.
As for SPF, most people I know refer to it as SenderID since it is implemented in Exchange 2003 SP2, a very common mail server in the corporate world. I'll add that there is already a great amount of support for it, I use it to score spam right now, in the future I will reject it based on it but for now it gives me more information about what is coming at me.I haven't seen an elegant domainkeys solution yet but my new MTAs won't be exchange so I can probably do it just find there.
Seems to me its easier just to use domainkeys and senderID. The problem is standardizing. I can't require either one of them because not enough people are compliant. When that changes the spam world will get simpler until a flaw in the mechanism is found which I believe will lead to an encryption war.