not to worry. how many bosses do you know that actually read
slashdot?
Hey, mine does. Some time ago i made a little post about some of my work
and he started shooting e-mails like rockets, screaming
for some credit for my work mates and for himself!
It was a good laugh. =D
Batman can kill anyone he wants! Batman cuts off heads ALL the time and doesn't even think twice about it. This guy is so crazy and awesome that he flips out ALL the time. I heard that there was this time he was eating at a diner. And when some dude dropped a spoon Batman killed the whole town. My friend Mark said that he saw Batman totally uppercut some kid just because the kid opened a window.
And that's what I call REAL Ultimate Power!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
If you don't believe that Batman has REAL Ultimate Power you better get a life right now or he will chop your head off!!! It's an easy choice, if you ask me.
> Could you describe in more detail the components?
We use a slightly modified version of what PXEs offers. See http://pxes.sf.net
We added some patches to rdesktop to fix some bugs (the patches themselves taken from the rdesktop devel list), we added a better web server (coded by me), modified the init scripts so the thin clients use host names according to the company standard, and a lot of tiny things to help make it even more transparent to the user.
> And Win2003 with terminal services enabled. So you need client CALs for TS, right?
Right.
> And Office is installed on the server. Do you need some sort of additional license to run that on clients. Seems like you must, but I've never checked (thinking there is no way MS would allow it)
Yes. there's no difference between running office remotely or locally. You need a full license for every thin client.
> And finally, I don't understand the functionality you get by having a webserver and telnet server on the client?
They are only there for troubleshooting. If John calls and tells you his computer is crashing, you ask for John's cubicle number, telnet to TC[cubicle_number], and you can see which processes are running, check the logs for obvious problems, and so on.
I've been (for the most part) responsible for the implementation of the second larget thin-client rollout in my country. In fact, I'm still in that position, since we still have two whole buildings left to migrate.
The average box in this company is a Pentium II, 333Mhz, with 64MB of RAM with Trident PCI VGA.
They are way too slow to run a modern desktop (before we started the thin client rollout, they were mostly running their original Windows 95 installation), but they are fast enough to run Xfree 4.3 with accelerated 2D Trident drivers. They run *beautifully*. The large amount or RAM let's us add small webservers and telnet servers to the thin client disk images, and a Samba nmbd process so they have a NetBIOS name. We are using Terminal services on a Windows 2003 Server to provide a modern and relatively secure OS.
So far, the absolutely biggest complaint we have ever had is that Office 2003 does not include the "Office shortcut bar" (boo-f*ng-hoo) so we ended up installing the damn bar from an Office XP CD we had lying around.
The users are happy with their "new computers". They crash a lot less, Word and Excel open instantly, and if power goes out or the machine breaks, their whole session is intact. Help Desk is a lot easier now: When a thin client craps out, the techies just dump it and plug another one in, turn it on, and the user keeps on working as if nothing happened.
locked down? yes, they are. Very. But in this particular company there are nearly no "power users" and they barely even notice things the lack of a wallpaper. They just power it up and use it to work.
I would guess (and let me stress the GUESS part) is that you could limit the number of items in the "Add or Remove programs" menu... but in the other hand, that would be too easy to crack...
Now if only you had gay and engineering relatives then the rest of the joke could be as inoffensive as the architect part.
In other words, if you believe you have to qualify your 'expertise' in delivering a joke for whatever reason, chances are good that either you aren't qualified to deliver it, or it's not appropiate.
You took it the wrong way. Lay down on the caffeine and relax.
To label someone else's creation as ugly and broken (not to mention non-creative, clunky, flawed design, non-functional, etc) is, at best, short sighted and elitist.
"ugly and broken" were the "labels" (as you call them) for what i think would be a computer designed by software. Can you read at all? And to think someone modded you up.
And about the "clunky" and "flawed design" has nothing to do with being short sighted or elitist at all. What i'm talking about is exactly what happens when you take something like a house (something with very "human" things about it) and take away the human part.
Bah, forget it. Slashdot may be the wrong place and the wrong people to discuss something like this.
That's because you are closer to the engineer-think than the architect-think.
Geeks, nerds and techies in general seem to lack sensitivity for aesthetics. You just need a box, I just need a box, but that doesn't mean we can call a box a house.
"He just opens the drawer, grabs the first thing that will cover his skin, put it on, and go out to the street". Sounds familiar? It does to me =oP
To UGLY and BROKEN houses and buildings. There's a large percentage of architecture as a human activity that involves creativity and the ability to solve new problems as they come up.
If you tell me you can help design a bridge or a road with the aid of software,
then i'll buy it, but designing homes (what architecture is about) is way beyond the cold structure design.
Where I live, there's some kind of rivalry (sp?) between architects and what in my country is referred as a "civil engineer", which is an engineer specialized in structural design and buildings. Both are able to build a house, but most of the times you can easily spot the difference between a house built by an architect and a house built by an engineer: Houses built by engineers look "clunky", and while they may be built correctly from a structural point of view, they ocasionally suffer from design flaws such as having bedrooms too close to the kitchen (which means the odor of food being cooked invades other parts of the house). Put simply, the engineer knows about functionality. They don't know about "aesthetic design". And this is something a computer will never be able to learn either.
There's this joke: - What's an architect? - An architect is someone that isn't man enough to be an engineer, but not gay anough to be an interior decorator.
I think the joke sums it up nicely.... Oh, and my family is about 60% architects.
"dvd jon went had to go thru a lot of hell for what he did"
Dvd jon proved to us that we have a right to use our purchased media in whatever way we see fit as long as we don't break copyright (or other) law.
EULA? what EULA!? I'm copying music from my computer to my mp3 player, then on to another computer, all for my personal use, in the privacy of my home. No law broken here.
"I did a quick search and found about 2500 public printers in IBM's US offices."
Being a 40000 desktop migration, i would expect the number to approach then thousand printers. I've done a small security consulting job for Carrefour (not known in the USA, but it's the second largest retailer in the world after wal-mart) and In the network corresponding to my country alone (class B ipv4 network, ppp links connecting every shop with each other) I found over 1000 print servers for something like 2500 office desktops.
Now, everyone who bothered to reply to my post keeps whining about mobile computers. Where does the article say they are migrating the laptops? Of course Carrefour doesn't configure all 1000 printers (may be more) on every machine. The users get access to whatever printers his office/division/dept. needs to print to. Which can be as much as 6 or 7 printers *at most* (people hit the wrong button and end up printing in the wrong printer so often that it would be crazy to believe they can handle more than that).
Again, a *Desktop* (NOT a laptop) should -- and probably IS -- installed and configured __before __ the user even gets to boot the machine for the first time. If configuring laptops is such a big problem (which probably isn't), then i guess the 40000 thousand migrations would not include laptops and be done with it.
Slashdot Mirror
Only he chose to be Lex Luthor.
Well, I'm all for regulating the use of the internet connection at work,
but letting the cyborg kill them almost seems like a bit too much.
Just use GPG for any source code you happen
to accidentally mail yourself.. let them
own your encrypted e-mail if they want it..
Let's see what percentage of the market is actually aware of this and ...
what it means.
I feel when 80% of computers sold include these chips, we will feel
somewhat dissapointed..
Batman can kill anyone he wants! Batman cuts off heads ALL the time and doesn't even think twice about it. This guy is so crazy and awesome that he flips out ALL the time. I heard that there was this time he was eating at a diner. And when some dude dropped a spoon Batman killed the whole town. My friend Mark said that he saw Batman totally uppercut some kid just because the kid opened a window.
And that's what I call REAL Ultimate Power!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
If you don't believe that Batman has REAL Ultimate Power you better get a life right now or he will chop your head off!!! It's an easy choice, if you ask me.
> Could you describe in more detail the components?
We use a slightly modified version of what PXEs offers. See http://pxes.sf.net
We added some patches to rdesktop to fix some bugs (the patches themselves
taken from the rdesktop devel list), we added a better web server (coded by
me), modified the init scripts so the thin clients use host names according to
the company standard, and a lot of tiny things to help make it even more
transparent to the user.
> And Win2003 with terminal services enabled. So you need client CALs for TS, right?
Right.
> And Office is installed on the server. Do you need some sort of additional license to run that on clients. Seems like you must, but I've never checked (thinking there is no way MS would allow it)
Yes. there's no difference between running office remotely or locally. You need a full license for every thin client.
> And finally, I don't understand the functionality you get by having a webserver and telnet server on the client?
They are only there for troubleshooting. If John calls and tells you his
computer is crashing, you ask for John's cubicle number, telnet to
TC[cubicle_number], and you can see which processes are running,
check the logs for obvious problems, and so on.
I've been (for the most part) responsible for the implementation
of the second larget thin-client rollout in my country. In fact,
I'm still in that position, since we still have two whole buildings
left to migrate.
The average box in this company is a Pentium II, 333Mhz, with 64MB of RAM
with Trident PCI VGA.
They are way too slow to run a modern desktop (before we started the
thin client rollout, they were mostly running their original Windows 95
installation), but they are fast enough to run Xfree 4.3 with accelerated
2D Trident drivers. They run *beautifully*. The large amount or RAM
let's us add small webservers and telnet servers to the thin client disk
images, and a Samba nmbd process so they have a NetBIOS name. We are using
Terminal services on a Windows 2003 Server to provide a modern and relatively
secure OS.
So far, the absolutely biggest complaint we have ever had is that Office
2003 does not include the "Office shortcut bar" (boo-f*ng-hoo) so we ended
up installing the damn bar from an Office XP CD we had lying around.
The users are happy with their "new computers". They crash a lot less, Word
and Excel open instantly, and if power goes out or the machine breaks, their
whole session is intact. Help Desk is a lot easier now: When a thin client
craps out, the techies just dump it and plug another one in, turn it on,
and the user keeps on working as if nothing happened.
locked down? yes, they are. Very. But in this particular company there are
nearly no "power users" and they barely even notice things the lack of a
wallpaper. They just power it up and use it to work.
Oh, don't worry. That error message can be ignored safely.
BTW, if you are STILL reading this, your processor is living on borrowed time.
I would guess (and let me stress the GUESS part) is that you could limit
the number of items in the "Add or Remove programs" menu... but in the
other hand, that would be too easy to crack...
Time will tell i guess...
This 100GB compressed movie will be read from a hard drive..
*Courtain goes up..*
*Lights go dim...*
3
2
1
-----------
You have not powered off correctly.
Do you want to run SCANDISK? Y/y
So what does it mean? The bar going asian, i mean.
"how rude"? 3CPO, is that you?
whoops, i forgot to divide by 60. scratch that =oP
you mean more like 39420000 times the distance from us to the sun. (roughly).
You took it the wrong way. Lay down on the caffeine and relax.
"ugly and broken" were the "labels" (as you call them) for what i think
would be a computer designed by software. Can you read at all?
And to think someone modded you up.
And about the "clunky" and "flawed design" has nothing to do with being
short sighted or elitist at all. What i'm talking about is exactly what
happens when you take something like a house (something with very "human"
things about it) and take away the human part.
Bah, forget it. Slashdot may be the wrong place and the wrong people to
discuss something like this.
That's because you are closer to the engineer-think than the architect-think.
Geeks, nerds and techies in general seem to lack sensitivity for aesthetics. You just need a box, I just need a box, but that doesn't mean we can call a box a house.
"He just opens the drawer, grabs the first thing that will cover his skin, put it on, and go out to the street". Sounds familiar? It does to me =oP
To UGLY and BROKEN houses and buildings. There's a large percentage of
... Oh, and my family is about 60% architects.
architecture as a human activity that involves creativity and the ability to
solve new problems as they come up.
If you tell me you can help design a bridge or a road with the aid of software,
then i'll buy it, but designing homes (what architecture is about) is way beyond the cold structure design.
Where I live, there's some kind of rivalry (sp?) between architects and what
in my country is referred as a "civil engineer", which is an engineer specialized in structural design and buildings. Both are able to build a house,
but most of the times you can easily spot the difference between a house built
by an architect and a house built by an engineer: Houses built by engineers look "clunky", and while they may be built correctly from a structural point of view, they ocasionally suffer from design flaws such as having bedrooms too close to the kitchen (which means the odor of food being cooked invades other parts of the house). Put simply, the engineer knows about functionality. They
don't know about "aesthetic design". And this is something a computer will never be able to learn either.
There's this joke:
- What's an architect?
- An architect is someone that isn't man enough to be an engineer, but not gay anough to be an interior decorator.
I think the joke sums it up nicely.
Besides, did you see the price tag on the 50ml "octopus robot" ink cartridge from HP? Better stick with a laser octoups.
MAN, that swf file takes long to reboot! ;o)
I have determined that there's *NOT* a vulnerability in your sister.
I'd be worried if i were you.
Insert "shit hitting fan" sound effect here.
"dvd jon went had to go thru a lot of hell for what he did"
Dvd jon proved to us that we have a right to use our purchased media in whatever way
we see fit as long as we don't break copyright (or other) law.
EULA? what EULA!? I'm copying music from my computer to my mp3 player, then
on to another computer, all for my personal use, in the privacy of my home.
No law broken here.
"I wonder how long until all the *nix geeks get over their OS and just realize the fact that MS will prevail."
I wonder how long until all the windows geeks get over their OS and just realize the fact that Linux will prevail.
"You don't know what you're talking about."
Yes, i do.
"I did a quick search and found about 2500 public printers in IBM's US offices."
Being a 40000 desktop migration, i would expect the number to approach then thousand printers. I've done a small security consulting job for Carrefour (not known in the USA, but it's the second largest retailer in the world after wal-mart) and
In the network corresponding to my country alone (class B ipv4 network, ppp links connecting every shop with each other) I found over 1000 print servers for something like 2500 office desktops.
Now, everyone who bothered to reply to my post keeps whining about mobile computers. Where does the article say they are migrating the laptops? Of course
Carrefour doesn't configure all 1000 printers (may be more) on every machine.
The users get access to whatever printers his office/division/dept. needs to print to. Which can be as much as 6 or 7 printers *at most* (people hit the wrong button and end up printing in the wrong printer so often that it would be crazy to believe they can handle more than that).
Again, a *Desktop* (NOT a laptop) should -- and probably IS -- installed and configured __before __ the user even gets to boot the machine for the first time. If configuring laptops is such a big problem (which probably isn't), then i guess the 40000 thousand migrations would not include laptops and be done with it.