It looks nice, perhaps if you have a massive IT budget, but I don't see why Deep Freeze is even necessary for Mac users:
1. You can deploy system images with the NetBoot, NetInstall and NetRestore tools built into OS X Server.
2. You can lock a Mac user down without root, apps will run just fine, we don't have the shitty legacy apps that require admin privileges to run problem on Macs like we do on Windows.
3. If there does happen to be an app that a user needs to install on their own, 9 times out of 10 it will run just fine installed under their own home directory unless it requires changes to system libraries or kexts.
4. You pop an extra drive in the machine when you deploy it, or you set up OD to direct Time Machine backups to a file server. If a user trashes something, you have backups that can be restored with ease.
I don't know if you've ever actually administered a Mac OS X Server in the last 5 years on a regular basis, but it has done all of those things quite well since the 10.4 days back in '05. Can you cite an example of something you do in AD that you can't do in OD? Exchange has definitely got some more features and way more 3rd party support, but OS X Server does provide IMAP, group calendaring, address lists, chat and wiki collaboration tools; that are all integrated with OD.
I wonder if Apple would be able to (or has already) delivered an imaging solution so you can roll out a few workstations that start out both identical and functional.
Yes, they have a services hosted on Mac OS X Server called NetBoot, NetInstall and NetRestore that do system imaging functions. You can read some marketing speak about it here and here. I've been using it since OS 10.4, it's easy to set up and works pretty well.
I don't know what's different about your guys AD setups, but I haven't had to do any more than put in an admin username/password to "Bind" Macs to our AD system, ever since OS 10.4 came along with the Directory Utility it's been cake.
Filemon and Regmon are also incredibly useful for finding out what poorly coded software packages (such as MS's own GP 9) with permissions issues are trying to do to files and registry. I've used them on several occasions to put together post-install scripts to change permissions, allowing programs to at least run under a regular user account w/out admin privileges.
And to jab the Apply fanboys - Apple releases OS updates YEARLY for $130.
Wrong, Apple stopped doing yearly OS updates once their OS finally reached general usability, which was version 10.3 (back in '03). Anyways, they've been supporting their most recent OS releases for at least 4 years, you don't have to upgrade Mac OS soon as it comes out, just like you don't have to upgrade Windows as soon as a new release comes out.
I bet if MS released OS updates every year for $130, everyone would be up in arms, but when Apple adds a program like Notepad to it's OS, they repackage it, and call it something cute. I'm waiting for Apple Liger (it comes with a new theme!!!!!!!!!).
If you were an admin that had actually supported some Macs, you'd realize that there are always un-advertised features in those OS releases that actually make your job as an admin easier. Additionally, based on that comment, I can tell you've never actually used Mac OS X for any length of time. By the way, 10.6 is offered as an upgrade for merely $30 and it doesn't come with any new eye candy, just underlying OS refinements that make Active Directory and Exchange integration work better, and memory and disk footprints smaller.
Because I'm a legitimate sysadmin, and when I load on Windows XP, Server, or even Linux (Redhat, or another one with support) I purchase the program, and make sure my clients are fully licenced.
Well then, you've had the fortune to only deal with companies that pony up the cash for volume licenses then. When you work for a company that only buys OEM licenses, WGA makes things that you take for granted as an admin, hell. Disaster recovery, Terminal Services, system images and virtualization all become a pain in the ass or even impossible to practically implement thanks to WGA.
And EDGE which ATT considers 2.5G is actually in the 3G specification. They advertize this so people don't expect 'fast' data access with 2G, and to get people to upgrade to 3G.
In my experience, EvDO still smokes EDGE from every practical sense, especially in dense buildings, suburban and rural areas, I would not consider it on par with Verizon and Sprint's "3G".
Boo-freakin-hoo AT&T, you blew your (iPhone) revenues on obnoxious and pervasive advertising while VZW spent their revenues building out their 3G network (first) with obnoxious advertisements following afterward. While I hate you both, you have no case AT&T and your network is inferior.
Any of my European friends worried about the vast knowledge our acquaintances from over the water know about guns, bullets and how well they kill each other?
You don't live here, I assume handguns are likely outlawed in your country. So why are you so worried about it?
This alone would make the unit worth billions. But with proper servo actuators and an advanced targeting system, it could also protect the perimeter against ordnance like RPGs, mortars, cruise missiles and maybe even air-to-ground munitions.
That just reminded me of the laser perimeter fence in the movie Congo with the badass robot operated turrets, except they'd have some frickin' lasers mounted on 'em, sweet...
Ahh, Bonzai Buddy, that fucker brings back memories. Back in the NT4 days a particular luser kept re-installing that garbage, unfortunately they needed local admin privileges to be able to run our accounting package (not to mention, other crappily coded software). Solution: un-install Bonzai Buddy, create dummy folders and apply DENY privileges to keep that POS from ever installing again.
IANAP... but I would assume that the odds of an object traveling that fast, hitting the earth, would be very slim. The energy necessary to accelerate it, and the distance it would potentially travel in a short amount of time, odds are that it would likely obliterate itself and some other object before it even entered our solar system.
From what I can gather, the difference between Instant On and POP is that Instant On pulses the radar long enough to allow proper calibration once it's in hot standby. It's unlikely, but you could pick up an Instant On hit on a radar detector from vehicles in front of you. POP is much shorter at 67ms, therefore it's undetectable by most radar detectors unless they have that specific feature. In either case, much like Laser, if it's aimed at you, you're already screwed once the detector goes off.
I would be more concerned with the legality of MPH Industries' radar POP mode. In summary, the company is marketing radar guns with a mode that allows officers to obtain speed readings that are at best, inaccurate. Of course, the only place a warning about the inaccuracy of this mode is found, is in the radar's instruction manual. How many police officers do you think read the instruction manuals that accompany their equipment? Reports of people "getting POPped" have shown up in WV, OH, GA, NV, NJ, and NY.
"POP is mode that emits a very brief (67 millisecond) pulse of radar to determine the speed. Its meant to defeat radar detectors. It works because the local oscillator sweep (the "tuner") in most detectors, (especially cheap ones) is too slow to notice this brief pulse. Newer and more expensive detectors have solved this by making a little detour during the sweep to check for POP. It's like flipping through the channels on your TV, but going back to check if your favourite show has started on channel 2 every so often. Except in a radar detector this is happening hundreds of times per second.
POP can be inaccurate because the electronics in the police radar don't have time enough to stabilize. It's like suddenly jumping on your bathroom scale. The pointer with fluctuate violently until it settles down on the the true reading. With POP it can sometimes indicate an inaccurate speed due to this instability. "
It mentions in the Wikipedia entry [wikipedia.org] that LIDAR is able to reflect better off non-metallic objects, like aerosols, clouds and even rain, that doesn't exactly sound like the ideal tool for the application...
I know this doesn't apply to the fixed speed camera application, but the last time I saw a cop writing (enforcing) speeding tickets out in the rain was... never.
The only bands I've ever seen fixed traffic radars use around here in the US are Ka and sometimes K, both radar.
"What is the benefit of LIDAR? Is it more accurate, or just easier to 'aim'? "
It doesn't usually set off your radar detector as quickly...so, easier to catch motorists with those...and generate revenue off of them too.
My Valentine One is supposed to be one of the best at radar and laser detection, but, down here where I live in southern LA, I haven't really ever seen laser by the cops, I guess they don't have the money down here for that, hell, I still see a LOT of Xband radar used by the cops in the city here in New Orleans.
Up here in Greater Cincinnati, I haven't seen X band used in over 10 years, I actually disabled it in city mode on my Escort. Laser on the other hand is all you see on the highways around here, rarely do you ever see K band shot on the highway.
And for 99% of users, 5GB/month on a cell phone may as well be unlimited.
As someone already pointed out above, you could theoretically go over the 5GB cap by merely saturating your phone's connection for 12 minutes a day (watching streaming video for instance). Therefore, 5GB is not even close to "unlimited", I could see more than 1% of users getting charged overages. Ask an Android or iPhone user how much data they average a month sometime, most people are using >3GB/mo.
Yeah, I'm aware of the MSI packages available. Unfortunately MSIs deployed via GPO do not help me with the 15 Macs running various versions of CS, Flash and Acrobat.
Question... why to this day does Adobe STILL not have some kind of unified server update solution for business networks? Sure, as an admin, I can roll my own scripts together to get it done, but with the frequency required lately, it's getting really old. It drives me insane having to download and install the same CS updates on multiple machines. Acrobat Reader and Flash updates on multiple browsers and platforms is even worse.
In T-Mobile's case, it's not a special small cell repeater, and it's not patented. It's called UMA and it's a 3GPP standard. Basically it's Voice over IP on WiFi; you don't have to exclusively use T-Mobile's branded Linksys access points either, you can use any 802.11 a/b/g network.
Any phone manufacturer is free to implement it in their handsets, and any carrier can carry those handsets and implement the technology on their back-end to support it. Tmo isn't the only carrier that has WiFi roaming, Cincinnati Bell does and they actually launched the service a couple weeks before Tmo did. There are many other carriers around the world that support UMA capable handsets as well. AT&T doesn't use it because... hell I don't know why. Because they're stupid and evil? My house has spotty GSM coverage, that's basically the main reason I use a UMA capable BlackBerry instead of an Android or iPhone.
I haven't messed with certs in RDP as I do all my RDP sessions over SSH tunnels and VPN. But I would guess that you'd import the certificate through the Certificates MMC snap-in similar to how you do signed e-mail in Outlook.
Yeah, we'll we'd all like to see Verisign and the like not charge a fucking arm and a leg for a cert used to secure a webmail server, a mythweb server, etc.
I use StartSSL, they're a pretty decent provider of free class 1 certs, and their root certs are already in every major browser except IE, and they provide a nice lil' page that you can link to, to install the root certs into IE (after clicking through like 8 IE warning dialogs, no joke). They also use RSA for the signing algorithm, not that MD5 crap. You can also add their root certs to the domain certificate policy in Active Directory to get the root certs automatically distributed to all the IE users in your domain.
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It looks nice, perhaps if you have a massive IT budget, but I don't see why Deep Freeze is even necessary for Mac users:
1. You can deploy system images with the NetBoot, NetInstall and NetRestore tools built into OS X Server.
2. You can lock a Mac user down without root, apps will run just fine, we don't have the shitty legacy apps that require admin privileges to run problem on Macs like we do on Windows.
3. If there does happen to be an app that a user needs to install on their own, 9 times out of 10 it will run just fine installed under their own home directory unless it requires changes to system libraries or kexts.
4. You pop an extra drive in the machine when you deploy it, or you set up OD to direct Time Machine backups to a file server. If a user trashes something, you have backups that can be restored with ease.
I don't know if you've ever actually administered a Mac OS X Server in the last 5 years on a regular basis, but it has done all of those things quite well since the 10.4 days back in '05. Can you cite an example of something you do in AD that you can't do in OD? Exchange has definitely got some more features and way more 3rd party support, but OS X Server does provide IMAP, group calendaring, address lists, chat and wiki collaboration tools; that are all integrated with OD.
Yes, they have a services hosted on Mac OS X Server called NetBoot, NetInstall and NetRestore that do system imaging functions. You can read some marketing speak about it here and here. I've been using it since OS 10.4, it's easy to set up and works pretty well.
I don't know what's different about your guys AD setups, but I haven't had to do any more than put in an admin username/password to "Bind" Macs to our AD system, ever since OS 10.4 came along with the Directory Utility it's been cake.
Filemon and Regmon are also incredibly useful for finding out what poorly coded software packages (such as MS's own GP 9) with permissions issues are trying to do to files and registry. I've used them on several occasions to put together post-install scripts to change permissions, allowing programs to at least run under a regular user account w/out admin privileges.
Wrong, Apple stopped doing yearly OS updates once their OS finally reached general usability, which was version 10.3 (back in '03). Anyways, they've been supporting their most recent OS releases for at least 4 years, you don't have to upgrade Mac OS soon as it comes out, just like you don't have to upgrade Windows as soon as a new release comes out.
If you were an admin that had actually supported some Macs, you'd realize that there are always un-advertised features in those OS releases that actually make your job as an admin easier. Additionally, based on that comment, I can tell you've never actually used Mac OS X for any length of time. By the way, 10.6 is offered as an upgrade for merely $30 and it doesn't come with any new eye candy, just underlying OS refinements that make Active Directory and Exchange integration work better, and memory and disk footprints smaller.
Well then, you've had the fortune to only deal with companies that pony up the cash for volume licenses then. When you work for a company that only buys OEM licenses, WGA makes things that you take for granted as an admin, hell. Disaster recovery, Terminal Services, system images and virtualization all become a pain in the ass or even impossible to practically implement thanks to WGA.
Why am I only seeing an x86 version available for Mac OS X then?
In my experience, EvDO still smokes EDGE from every practical sense, especially in dense buildings, suburban and rural areas, I would not consider it on par with Verizon and Sprint's "3G".
Boo-freakin-hoo AT&T, you blew your (iPhone) revenues on obnoxious and pervasive advertising while VZW spent their revenues building out their 3G network (first) with obnoxious advertisements following afterward. While I hate you both, you have no case AT&T and your network is inferior.
So true... wish I had mod points.
Any of my European friends worried about the vast knowledge our acquaintances from over the water know about guns, bullets and how well they kill each other?
You don't live here, I assume handguns are likely outlawed in your country. So why are you so worried about it?
That just reminded me of the laser perimeter fence in the movie Congo with the badass robot operated turrets, except they'd have some frickin' lasers mounted on 'em, sweet...
Ahh, Bonzai Buddy, that fucker brings back memories. Back in the NT4 days a particular luser kept re-installing that garbage, unfortunately they needed local admin privileges to be able to run our accounting package (not to mention, other crappily coded software). Solution: un-install Bonzai Buddy, create dummy folders and apply DENY privileges to keep that POS from ever installing again.
IANAP... but I would assume that the odds of an object traveling that fast, hitting the earth, would be very slim. The energy necessary to accelerate it, and the distance it would potentially travel in a short amount of time, odds are that it would likely obliterate itself and some other object before it even entered our solar system.
From what I can gather, the difference between Instant On and POP is that Instant On pulses the radar long enough to allow proper calibration once it's in hot standby. It's unlikely, but you could pick up an Instant On hit on a radar detector from vehicles in front of you. POP is much shorter at 67ms, therefore it's undetectable by most radar detectors unless they have that specific feature. In either case, much like Laser, if it's aimed at you, you're already screwed once the detector goes off.
I would be more concerned with the legality of MPH Industries' radar POP mode. In summary, the company is marketing radar guns with a mode that allows officers to obtain speed readings that are at best, inaccurate. Of course, the only place a warning about the inaccuracy of this mode is found, is in the radar's instruction manual. How many police officers do you think read the instruction manuals that accompany their equipment? Reports of people "getting POPped" have shown up in WV, OH, GA, NV, NJ, and NY.
"POP is mode that emits a very brief (67 millisecond) pulse of radar to determine the speed. Its meant to defeat radar detectors. It works because the local oscillator sweep (the "tuner") in most detectors, (especially cheap ones) is too slow to notice this brief pulse. Newer and more expensive detectors have solved this by making a little detour during the sweep to check for POP. It's like flipping through the channels on your TV, but going back to check if your favourite show has started on channel 2 every so often. Except in a radar detector this is happening hundreds of times per second.
POP can be inaccurate because the electronics in the police radar don't have time enough to stabilize. It's like suddenly jumping on your bathroom scale. The pointer with fluctuate violently until it settles down on the the true reading. With POP it can sometimes indicate an inaccurate speed due to this instability. "
I know this doesn't apply to the fixed speed camera application, but the last time I saw a cop writing (enforcing) speeding tickets out in the rain was... never.
The only bands I've ever seen fixed traffic radars use around here in the US are Ka and sometimes K, both radar.
"What is the benefit of LIDAR? Is it more accurate, or just easier to 'aim'? "
It doesn't usually set off your radar detector as quickly...so, easier to catch motorists with those...and generate revenue off of them too.
My Valentine One is supposed to be one of the best at radar and laser detection, but, down here where I live in southern LA, I haven't really ever seen laser by the cops, I guess they don't have the money down here for that, hell, I still see a LOT of Xband radar used by the cops in the city here in New Orleans.
Up here in Greater Cincinnati, I haven't seen X band used in over 10 years, I actually disabled it in city mode on my Escort. Laser on the other hand is all you see on the highways around here, rarely do you ever see K band shot on the highway.
As someone already pointed out above, you could theoretically go over the 5GB cap by merely saturating your phone's connection for 12 minutes a day (watching streaming video for instance). Therefore, 5GB is not even close to "unlimited", I could see more than 1% of users getting charged overages. Ask an Android or iPhone user how much data they average a month sometime, most people are using >3GB/mo.
Yeah, I'm aware of the MSI packages available. Unfortunately MSIs deployed via GPO do not help me with the 15 Macs running various versions of CS, Flash and Acrobat.
It needs to execute code from the data segment to install!? What a piece! Just un-install it and be done with it.
Question... why to this day does Adobe STILL not have some kind of unified server update solution for business networks? Sure, as an admin, I can roll my own scripts together to get it done, but with the frequency required lately, it's getting really old. It drives me insane having to download and install the same CS updates on multiple machines. Acrobat Reader and Flash updates on multiple browsers and platforms is even worse.
In T-Mobile's case, it's not a special small cell repeater, and it's not patented. It's called UMA and it's a 3GPP standard. Basically it's Voice over IP on WiFi; you don't have to exclusively use T-Mobile's branded Linksys access points either, you can use any 802.11 a/b/g network.
Any phone manufacturer is free to implement it in their handsets, and any carrier can carry those handsets and implement the technology on their back-end to support it. Tmo isn't the only carrier that has WiFi roaming, Cincinnati Bell does and they actually launched the service a couple weeks before Tmo did. There are many other carriers around the world that support UMA capable handsets as well. AT&T doesn't use it because... hell I don't know why. Because they're stupid and evil? My house has spotty GSM coverage, that's basically the main reason I use a UMA capable BlackBerry instead of an Android or iPhone.
I haven't messed with certs in RDP as I do all my RDP sessions over SSH tunnels and VPN. But I would guess that you'd import the certificate through the Certificates MMC snap-in similar to how you do signed e-mail in Outlook.
Yeah, we'll we'd all like to see Verisign and the like not charge a fucking arm and a leg for a cert used to secure a webmail server, a mythweb server, etc.
I use StartSSL, they're a pretty decent provider of free class 1 certs, and their root certs are already in every major browser except IE, and they provide a nice lil' page that you can link to, to install the root certs into IE (after clicking through like 8 IE warning dialogs, no joke). They also use RSA for the signing algorithm, not that MD5 crap. You can also add their root certs to the domain certificate policy in Active Directory to get the root certs automatically distributed to all the IE users in your domain.