As a technical person I would rather see people that have 'CAD experience' with a sample of CAD software (even if it's rather unknown) than a guy who just has experience. The first one is going to be able to adapt to whatever program we use, the other one is going to have trouble switching from his favorite software to whatever we use.
I have one such person that has difficulty whenever we upgrade a piece of software so she is still stuck on Thunderbird 1, Firefox 2 and Office 2004. Simply upgrading the Office Suite to the latest version gave her so much problems we had to switch her back. She was 'so used' to the other package and 'doesn't like to change' that it's actually hindering the company.
Incorrect, the speed limit is actually the expected speed in not-so-good conditions here in NYS. If it snows, I can safely do 55-65 on the highway - some hilly areas have ridiculous speed limits of 35, no houses. This speed limit is to be safe on a dark night (deer, bears) or during winter season (snow, ice). During the day in spring/summer you can do 55 or even 65 on those roads, no problem.
Another reason for speed limits is for speed traps. There is a speed limit close by here that is 55 for a whole stretch of road, passes a golf course and everything. Going downhill one of the hills it changes suddenly to 35, the only thing that is there is a spot that is hidden and easy for cops to sit and catch people going downhill without pressing the gas or brakes (you go about 45-55). Over the hill it changes to 55 again.
This is not just for Apple & AT&T but for any type of phone. Imho there should be no subsidized contracts. We should pay a low (flat-fee) price (~$10/mo) for phone & data and pay full price for unlocked, fully-functional cell phones. This would a) fix a lot of the waste problem used cell phones bring (every 12-18 months you wouldn't get a new one), b) force cell phone makers to make better (sturdier) phones - I'm looking at you Nokia, c) force cell phone makers to make better (more competent or at least uniform) interfaces and d) allow you to take your (optimal) cell phone from carrier to carrier as they compete in quality, service and cost for your contract.
I would love the Palm Pre but I utterly hate Sprint having switched last year because their reception sucks just about anywhere outside a large city. I would also like the iPhone but I'm not willing to pay AT&T the extra costs for unlimited data.
I think the RIAA wants it to go to Supreme Court and with the current and future set of judges being appointed by a government paid for by the MPAA & RIAA they will get a wide, sweeping, unconstitutional ruling to do whatever they want to people that even think about whistling a song.
I wonder why judges are throwing out defenses before the defense could even bring out the arguments of their reasoning. Copying (downloading) music for personal purposes is considered fair use in many if not all European countries.
This seems like another bought off or pressured case.
Usually it's something in the sense of: the college has purchased some tools that were promised to work but except of giving the managers nice pie-graphs (what they call dashboards) are a pain to actually implement, program AND use on the other end (HEAT, Peoplesoft, SharePoint, SAP) and require years of fine tuning to perfect.
There are plenty of good open and closed source products that do either all or parts of the work that each of those packages do and they usually integrate really well with each other if you have but a single programmer or consultant. However for some or another reason, most of the money is (or was) dumped into things that have proven across the board not to work but because of the numbers being cooked up by the sales people and the exorbitant amounts of money it costs, managers think it's a good product. Because of the amount of money involved, most managers also believe that endless amounts of support and a really good contract is involved but usually neither is true and what the sales pitch didn't include was that those options are an extra cost at least 3 times as much as the product.
The problem is that those things are just a nuisance for a lot of things. It just pops up randomly because a developer forgot to test the latest update or didn't install the new certificate on all the frontends. Then you have the 'intermediate' CA's where if the intermediate issuer isn't in the browser CA's or the browser doesn't support intermediates or wildcard certificates it gives you another warning. Or somebody let the certificate expire or didn't get it signed by a well-known CA (usually the less-professional sites that are self-signing). Then if your ISP isn't honest (which apparently 99% of them these days aren't) with their DNS and you go to https://wrongname.com/ it will give you the https version of their ad page on the other domain which of course gives a big warning.
I have seen warnings on important sites like Wells Fargo and Bank of America and there are permanent warnings on some other sites that I use frequently that are either self-signed or expired. I usually verify them and it's not my system that's been hijacked so I am ignoring them largely as well.
Not everybody (hardly anyone) needs a single block device in a work environment. You might as well hang the hard drive in their systems if that's all you need, cheaper, faster and simpler. Also block devices don't separate very well. You have to assign and reserve a certain block of data no matter whether it's used.
NFS is much more granular that way, you put everything on a large block device, give it some permissions and you're good to go. Also for shared data, sharing block devices might not be a good idea because of locking issues etc. NFS handles this much more elegant.
Besides, there is not really an alternative to NFS these days. SMB is still too slow and uses too much resources, other protocols are os or vendor specific or require at least the loading of drivers or kernel modules. And they all offer service similar to NFS. It's not encrypted, just packaged differently and hopefully it has some extra features but with a decent NFS setup this can usually get squared away.
Unlike common belief, the appendix does seem to have a function in our systems, some researchers say it harbors beneficial bacteria and helps with the digestive system. I don't believe there is anything in our bodies that is genuinely useless.
There is a lurking downside. As was explained by other researchers and often ignored by advocates (and conveniently the industry) - the drives become significantly slower over time requiring something similar to a defrag but at a much lower level. The good thing is that the things will still be (slightly) faster than a regular hard drive however how is a vendor going to tell his customer that after two years his performance will drop significantly. If I notice a drop in my current storage throughput, there is something wrong which I need to fix.
Also, a lot of the vendors and a lot more benchmarks that don't have a clue about proper testing of these caveats will report much higher rates because they are testing a virgin product while a customer will be expecting a certain level throughout the life of the product (eg. when streaming/editing live video).
At this point, spinning drives are plenty fast in most high-profile configurations. You put 16 (or more) 15k drives in an enclosure over RAID-5 and the delay of the heads searching for data nor the throughput of the drive is really an issue, the issues start to crop up at higher levels where the software has to do it's work.
I still don't see the benefit of outsourcing for these large projects. I can understand the benefit where you have a single small project and no in-house knowledge or need to hire someone to do it. For a $300M datacenter however you do need a full time datacenter manager and at least a couple of hard- and software technicians.
If you outsource it you still have to pay for those people but on top of that you also have to pay for another companies and your own contracting overhead as well as profits (and in these IT projects profits are typically in the 50%-500% range) thus eating everything you could have ever thought of saving on it. If you needed a $300M datacenter to host all your applications, what makes you think that another company won't need to expand into a similar datacenter once you buy all services from them? Sure it might not be visible right away (the first 2 years) but after that you'll keep paying on a monthly or yearly basis while your datacenter would already have been paid for and you only need to pay for utilities and upkeep.
The "cloud" doesn't make your applications magically disappear. It just moves your applications to another person's datacenter which you now have to pay more for in order to increase someone else's profits. The only reason to outsource to a 'cloud' or 'someone else's datacenter' is either because you don't have the scale necessary to build your own, your staff is too incompetent to build their own or your managing layer is too incompetent to do simple arithmetics or to hire somebody with the correct skill set.
Plenty of people already do it - heck even the musicians are starting to turn away from RIAA-backing labels. The RIAA however has found another way to keep their businesses alive: government bailouts. Just like GM, Ford, Chrysler and a host of other companies that couldn't cut it in the new world, they are now being funded by the government which just creates a law about who should pay for these old businesses. Who's paying for it now: the radio stations. The government has decided that the radio stations should pay the RIAA for songs they play. Over the years, the labels have paid DJ's to promote their music (payola), gotten free airtime etc. etc. and now they expect the radio stations to pay it all back. They already pushed the internet radio stations to pay more for the right to play any song, now they are pushing the am/fm radio stations to pay for the rights to play any song.
The RIAA has effectively become through lobbying a government agency. They are being allowed to tax anybody who plays or makes public any type of music in any type of way even if the musician or label is not signed with them.
Many computers already have this. Most servers have trays, trays are available for single installation as well. Mac Pro's have some type of slide you need to mount to the bottom of the drive. Dell has something similar although you still need to route cables.
They probably mean 'open' languages. It's similar to open source. There are programming languages whose specifications are not fully published or not fully implementable by others for whatever reason (licensing, patents), only the publisher knows about all the language details (like say RealBasic, some instructional languages, the Visual series (Basic, J++) and Java-knockoff C#).
Zune? Never knew they had a media manager. Probably works with Zune only. Besides it's Windows only, at least iTunes works on Mac and Windows.
J River is paid software, not really all that popular because of it.
Media Monkey is also paid software (crippled free version)
foobar and Winamp are also Windows only and they don't do all that great of a job with anything but straight audio/video files. Not really media managers, more like media players.
Actually that type of group settings can be done in Workgroup Manager (WGM) just as well.
I setup the GPs for a small company once in a couple of hours so all machines would have Office installed + any departmental software needed; NetBoot or NetInstall will take care of that for you. You can also use Apple Remote Desktop for it. DeployStudio has it even built-in to do this right in the GUI so that if you deploy an image it will automatically deploy software you specify later.
anyone not a developer was locked down to basic desktop and apps; Whether you use User Groups or Computer Groups for this: select the group in WGM -> Preferences -> make changes for it in the Applications and Finder settings. With Parental Controls you can also define certain sites not to be visited etc.
laptops had all the wireless networks configured + firewall set on "block all incoming" when not on the company network, WGM Group -> Preferences -> Network. You can also import specific configurations by finding the preference list it's saved in on a particular machine and then go into Details and copy it there. Especially for specific firewall rules this is interesting.
all machines branded with company screen-saver Again, possible by importing the screensaver preference file into WGM. There is detailed documentation on the topic.
and all machines 100% patched for all managed apps WGM Group -> Preferences -> Software Update. You can schedule them automatically but if you want more control, use Apple Remote Desktop to initialize it. It's usually not a good idea to blindly enable all updates so you can enable/disable updates on the server.
all machines configured to run their maintenance plans every friday night; Again, this is a Unix-based system we're talking about, scheduled background jobs have been in there since the beginning and you can synchronize all those preferences through WGM or automate them in Remote Desktop.
power-saving options applied network wide WGM Group -> Preferences -> Energy Saver
and for all the sales guys execute rights denied for anything outside of "Program Files" and "Windows" folders as they were notorious for downloading crap. As mentioned above.
They're planning for the near future when gas prices (practically the only necessity we import on large scale in this country) will be in scientific notation.
Well, maybe if the credit companies pulled a credit report at that exact time he might have a perfect credit score for life as part of your credit score is calculated on how much combined debt you have compared to your credit limits. Your revolving credit limit is: 24e15, debt: $2000, very good ratio.
Is there a decent alternative for iTunes then? iTunes (and Microsoft) got so big because of integration. It's a media manager that does just about anything you need to do (video, audio, podcasts, rentals, purchases, device syncs) and unlike Microsoft software it works great. The alternatives are WMP which looks like a Fisher-Price construction and is painfully slow, Songbird which looks pretty darn good but has some major bugs and annoyances that make it just not 'the Firefox of media players' although I have high hopes for the future, Amarok which used to be good until 1.4 but the latest incarnations began to look like WMP (I mean, what's with the control buttons) and the software has become overly complex like developers have been adding stuff without checking any UI plan, any others?
And you can sync other devices than iPod's as well - there are plugins to iTunes that sync certain other devices and if it's a mass storage device it should be pretty simple to implement.
Re:Software Projects vs. Traditional Projects
on
Why New Systems Fail
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· Score: 1
There are plenty of projects out there that get killed everyday. Even bridge projects get killed everyday. It's just that you don't notice because it hasn't gone to the compile stage (the building of the bridge) - most bridges get stuck in the political, feasibleness or 'is this really necessary' stage. By then a bridge building project has already consumed thousands if not millions in contractors, engineers, lobbyists and hookers and then in the backlash vendors will sue because somebody already promised they would buy stuff or have stuff made for the bridge but then they cancelled the project.
It's tax payers money, it's just a line item on the state or federal budget and compared to other items on the list (defense costs, political advertisements and toilet bowls) it's really nothing to mention.
Supposedly, e-mail between the company's server and the device is encrypted (although at one time, there were some protests to using Blackberries because the messages pass through RIM's servers which were located somewhere in Canada - I don't know if that's still the case).
So you first say that profiles on a network have to be limited, then you say they can be terabytes large?
DirectRT, E-Prime, Presentation, MATLAB (for some toolboxes)...
OD can provide 'group policies' too. You just apply the resource management to a group - that's all 'group policies' is, management of groups. Load balancing can be done on Open Directory it's called replica's. Open Directory has multi-master Kerberos across all replica's and there is the possibility for LDAP relays for remote offices or if you just have a lot of load. All other services can be load balanced as well, it's just a matter of having an admin with half a clue. 'Trusts' between directories can be established as well (I believe you're talking about cross-authentication). You seem to forget that Microsoft just established AD on the open and free technologies called LDAP and Kerberos, ran it over some proprietary protocol and then gave some management tools for it. There is nothing AD can do that you can't do in standard LDAP and Kerberos.
Oh yeah, that's really cool. Sorry but you can't get a profile larger than 100MB, yeah we have multi-terabyte systems but you can't use them conveniently. I have one user that currently has a home directory of 1.2TB on her Mac and it does it without complaining, the user doesn't even notice it's on the network.
As far as the admin point, some software doesn't run without being an admin. Most non-mainstream software will require your user to be an admin. Most if not all research software will require your user to be an admin. For some or another reason, elevating privileges was not something that has been engrained into the operating system (most Unix-based software can elevate right from within the program when you need the functionality) but rather something that has been tacked on later and it's an all-or-nothing deal so you need it before starting a program and it's not trivial to do so either (if it works at all)
Mac's have something like Active Directory, it's called Open Directory (based on OpenLDAP) and it can do the same stuff AD does. It even integrates with AD if you really need it to augment AD.
Yes, you've seen systems from TigerDirect and NewEgg that you halfly build yourself that are half the price of a Mac. Building it yourself in a business setting is just not possible unless you're willing to employ somebody to do it for you at which point the savings evaporate very quickly. I do it too for my home, I can build the machine however it takes me a few hours. My after-tax income is about $30/h but I'm sure I cost a lot more than that not to talk about what else I could be doing instead of building computers.
However feature-by-feature workstations or laptops from Dell or HP (or anywhere you can get a decent volume and support) are quite a bit more expensive than Apple machines. For some beefy configurations this difference is more than a few $1000. For us (Educational & Research Institution) it's actually cheaper to buy an Apple machine to run purely Windows than to get a Dell to do the same.
And how much do you think it costs us if a machine is not working? Currently ~$500/hours of immediate costs for some of our systems (luckily we have hot-standby for it). Apple will send somebody to my place right away if something goes wrong, I spend less than 15 minutes at the phone and replacement parts arrive within 24 hours. If really necessary, I drive down to an Apple Service Center or Apple Store with the machine and they'll fix it the same day. Dell can do NBD On-Site as well but as I noticed, for anything that isn't a hard drive they'll first have to ship you or the shop the replacement parts which apparently come through UPS Ground. For laptops it's even worse, Dell expects you to find a box and ship it to them yourself after which they'll ship you a replacement (3-5 business days) while Apple will overnight you a box with a brand new system that you can send back with the old system right away.
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As a technical person I would rather see people that have 'CAD experience' with a sample of CAD software (even if it's rather unknown) than a guy who just has experience. The first one is going to be able to adapt to whatever program we use, the other one is going to have trouble switching from his favorite software to whatever we use.
I have one such person that has difficulty whenever we upgrade a piece of software so she is still stuck on Thunderbird 1, Firefox 2 and Office 2004. Simply upgrading the Office Suite to the latest version gave her so much problems we had to switch her back. She was 'so used' to the other package and 'doesn't like to change' that it's actually hindering the company.
Incorrect, the speed limit is actually the expected speed in not-so-good conditions here in NYS. If it snows, I can safely do 55-65 on the highway - some hilly areas have ridiculous speed limits of 35, no houses. This speed limit is to be safe on a dark night (deer, bears) or during winter season (snow, ice). During the day in spring/summer you can do 55 or even 65 on those roads, no problem.
Another reason for speed limits is for speed traps. There is a speed limit close by here that is 55 for a whole stretch of road, passes a golf course and everything. Going downhill one of the hills it changes suddenly to 35, the only thing that is there is a spot that is hidden and easy for cops to sit and catch people going downhill without pressing the gas or brakes (you go about 45-55). Over the hill it changes to 55 again.
This is not just for Apple & AT&T but for any type of phone. Imho there should be no subsidized contracts. We should pay a low (flat-fee) price (~$10/mo) for phone & data and pay full price for unlocked, fully-functional cell phones. This would a) fix a lot of the waste problem used cell phones bring (every 12-18 months you wouldn't get a new one), b) force cell phone makers to make better (sturdier) phones - I'm looking at you Nokia, c) force cell phone makers to make better (more competent or at least uniform) interfaces and d) allow you to take your (optimal) cell phone from carrier to carrier as they compete in quality, service and cost for your contract.
I would love the Palm Pre but I utterly hate Sprint having switched last year because their reception sucks just about anywhere outside a large city. I would also like the iPhone but I'm not willing to pay AT&T the extra costs for unlimited data.
I think the RIAA wants it to go to Supreme Court and with the current and future set of judges being appointed by a government paid for by the MPAA & RIAA they will get a wide, sweeping, unconstitutional ruling to do whatever they want to people that even think about whistling a song.
I wonder why judges are throwing out defenses before the defense could even bring out the arguments of their reasoning. Copying (downloading) music for personal purposes is considered fair use in many if not all European countries.
This seems like another bought off or pressured case.
Usually it's something in the sense of: the college has purchased some tools that were promised to work but except of giving the managers nice pie-graphs (what they call dashboards) are a pain to actually implement, program AND use on the other end (HEAT, Peoplesoft, SharePoint, SAP) and require years of fine tuning to perfect.
There are plenty of good open and closed source products that do either all or parts of the work that each of those packages do and they usually integrate really well with each other if you have but a single programmer or consultant. However for some or another reason, most of the money is (or was) dumped into things that have proven across the board not to work but because of the numbers being cooked up by the sales people and the exorbitant amounts of money it costs, managers think it's a good product. Because of the amount of money involved, most managers also believe that endless amounts of support and a really good contract is involved but usually neither is true and what the sales pitch didn't include was that those options are an extra cost at least 3 times as much as the product.
The problem is that those things are just a nuisance for a lot of things. It just pops up randomly because a developer forgot to test the latest update or didn't install the new certificate on all the frontends. Then you have the 'intermediate' CA's where if the intermediate issuer isn't in the browser CA's or the browser doesn't support intermediates or wildcard certificates it gives you another warning. Or somebody let the certificate expire or didn't get it signed by a well-known CA (usually the less-professional sites that are self-signing). Then if your ISP isn't honest (which apparently 99% of them these days aren't) with their DNS and you go to https://wrongname.com/ it will give you the https version of their ad page on the other domain which of course gives a big warning.
I have seen warnings on important sites like Wells Fargo and Bank of America and there are permanent warnings on some other sites that I use frequently that are either self-signed or expired. I usually verify them and it's not my system that's been hijacked so I am ignoring them largely as well.
Not everybody (hardly anyone) needs a single block device in a work environment. You might as well hang the hard drive in their systems if that's all you need, cheaper, faster and simpler. Also block devices don't separate very well. You have to assign and reserve a certain block of data no matter whether it's used.
NFS is much more granular that way, you put everything on a large block device, give it some permissions and you're good to go. Also for shared data, sharing block devices might not be a good idea because of locking issues etc. NFS handles this much more elegant.
Besides, there is not really an alternative to NFS these days. SMB is still too slow and uses too much resources, other protocols are os or vendor specific or require at least the loading of drivers or kernel modules. And they all offer service similar to NFS. It's not encrypted, just packaged differently and hopefully it has some extra features but with a decent NFS setup this can usually get squared away.
Unlike common belief, the appendix does seem to have a function in our systems, some researchers say it harbors beneficial bacteria and helps with the digestive system. I don't believe there is anything in our bodies that is genuinely useless.
There is a lurking downside. As was explained by other researchers and often ignored by advocates (and conveniently the industry) - the drives become significantly slower over time requiring something similar to a defrag but at a much lower level. The good thing is that the things will still be (slightly) faster than a regular hard drive however how is a vendor going to tell his customer that after two years his performance will drop significantly. If I notice a drop in my current storage throughput, there is something wrong which I need to fix.
Also, a lot of the vendors and a lot more benchmarks that don't have a clue about proper testing of these caveats will report much higher rates because they are testing a virgin product while a customer will be expecting a certain level throughout the life of the product (eg. when streaming/editing live video).
At this point, spinning drives are plenty fast in most high-profile configurations. You put 16 (or more) 15k drives in an enclosure over RAID-5 and the delay of the heads searching for data nor the throughput of the drive is really an issue, the issues start to crop up at higher levels where the software has to do it's work.
I still don't see the benefit of outsourcing for these large projects. I can understand the benefit where you have a single small project and no in-house knowledge or need to hire someone to do it. For a $300M datacenter however you do need a full time datacenter manager and at least a couple of hard- and software technicians.
If you outsource it you still have to pay for those people but on top of that you also have to pay for another companies and your own contracting overhead as well as profits (and in these IT projects profits are typically in the 50%-500% range) thus eating everything you could have ever thought of saving on it. If you needed a $300M datacenter to host all your applications, what makes you think that another company won't need to expand into a similar datacenter once you buy all services from them? Sure it might not be visible right away (the first 2 years) but after that you'll keep paying on a monthly or yearly basis while your datacenter would already have been paid for and you only need to pay for utilities and upkeep.
The "cloud" doesn't make your applications magically disappear. It just moves your applications to another person's datacenter which you now have to pay more for in order to increase someone else's profits. The only reason to outsource to a 'cloud' or 'someone else's datacenter' is either because you don't have the scale necessary to build your own, your staff is too incompetent to build their own or your managing layer is too incompetent to do simple arithmetics or to hire somebody with the correct skill set.
Plenty of people already do it - heck even the musicians are starting to turn away from RIAA-backing labels. The RIAA however has found another way to keep their businesses alive: government bailouts. Just like GM, Ford, Chrysler and a host of other companies that couldn't cut it in the new world, they are now being funded by the government which just creates a law about who should pay for these old businesses. Who's paying for it now: the radio stations. The government has decided that the radio stations should pay the RIAA for songs they play. Over the years, the labels have paid DJ's to promote their music (payola), gotten free airtime etc. etc. and now they expect the radio stations to pay it all back. They already pushed the internet radio stations to pay more for the right to play any song, now they are pushing the am/fm radio stations to pay for the rights to play any song.
The RIAA has effectively become through lobbying a government agency. They are being allowed to tax anybody who plays or makes public any type of music in any type of way even if the musician or label is not signed with them.
I know, what if a sailor decides to catch a breath of fresh air and opens it.
Many computers already have this. Most servers have trays, trays are available for single installation as well. Mac Pro's have some type of slide you need to mount to the bottom of the drive. Dell has something similar although you still need to route cables.
They probably mean 'open' languages. It's similar to open source. There are programming languages whose specifications are not fully published or not fully implementable by others for whatever reason (licensing, patents), only the publisher knows about all the language details (like say RealBasic, some instructional languages, the Visual series (Basic, J++) and Java-knockoff C#).
Zune? Never knew they had a media manager. Probably works with Zune only. Besides it's Windows only, at least iTunes works on Mac and Windows.
J River is paid software, not really all that popular because of it.
Media Monkey is also paid software (crippled free version)
foobar and Winamp are also Windows only and they don't do all that great of a job with anything but straight audio/video files. Not really media managers, more like media players.
Actually that type of group settings can be done in Workgroup Manager (WGM) just as well.
I setup the GPs for a small company once in a couple of hours so all machines would have Office installed + any departmental software needed;
NetBoot or NetInstall will take care of that for you. You can also use Apple Remote Desktop for it. DeployStudio has it even built-in to do this right in the GUI so that if you deploy an image it will automatically deploy software you specify later.
anyone not a developer was locked down to basic desktop and apps;
Whether you use User Groups or Computer Groups for this: select the group in WGM -> Preferences -> make changes for it in the Applications and Finder settings. With Parental Controls you can also define certain sites not to be visited etc.
laptops had all the wireless networks configured + firewall set on "block all incoming" when not on the company network,
WGM Group -> Preferences -> Network. You can also import specific configurations by finding the preference list it's saved in on a particular machine and then go into Details and copy it there. Especially for specific firewall rules this is interesting.
all machines branded with company screen-saver
Again, possible by importing the screensaver preference file into WGM. There is detailed documentation on the topic.
and all machines 100% patched for all managed apps
WGM Group -> Preferences -> Software Update. You can schedule them automatically but if you want more control, use Apple Remote Desktop to initialize it. It's usually not a good idea to blindly enable all updates so you can enable/disable updates on the server.
all machines configured to run their maintenance plans every friday night;
Again, this is a Unix-based system we're talking about, scheduled background jobs have been in there since the beginning and you can synchronize all those preferences through WGM or automate them in Remote Desktop.
power-saving options applied network wide
WGM Group -> Preferences -> Energy Saver
and for all the sales guys execute rights denied for anything outside of "Program Files" and "Windows" folders as they were notorious for downloading crap.
As mentioned above.
They're planning for the near future when gas prices (practically the only necessity we import on large scale in this country) will be in scientific notation.
Well, maybe if the credit companies pulled a credit report at that exact time he might have a perfect credit score for life as part of your credit score is calculated on how much combined debt you have compared to your credit limits. Your revolving credit limit is: 24e15, debt: $2000, very good ratio.
Is there a decent alternative for iTunes then? iTunes (and Microsoft) got so big because of integration. It's a media manager that does just about anything you need to do (video, audio, podcasts, rentals, purchases, device syncs) and unlike Microsoft software it works great. The alternatives are WMP which looks like a Fisher-Price construction and is painfully slow, Songbird which looks pretty darn good but has some major bugs and annoyances that make it just not 'the Firefox of media players' although I have high hopes for the future, Amarok which used to be good until 1.4 but the latest incarnations began to look like WMP (I mean, what's with the control buttons) and the software has become overly complex like developers have been adding stuff without checking any UI plan, any others?
And you can sync other devices than iPod's as well - there are plugins to iTunes that sync certain other devices and if it's a mass storage device it should be pretty simple to implement.
There are plenty of projects out there that get killed everyday. Even bridge projects get killed everyday. It's just that you don't notice because it hasn't gone to the compile stage (the building of the bridge) - most bridges get stuck in the political, feasibleness or 'is this really necessary' stage. By then a bridge building project has already consumed thousands if not millions in contractors, engineers, lobbyists and hookers and then in the backlash vendors will sue because somebody already promised they would buy stuff or have stuff made for the bridge but then they cancelled the project.
Sometimes bridges get 'compiled' or built while having a PHB (*ahem*Palin*ahem*Ted Stevens*ahem*) in charge and that's when you'll notice (the famous bridges to nowhere or unnecessary duplicate bridges) - see also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravina_Island_Bridge and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridge_to_Nowhere
It's tax payers money, it's just a line item on the state or federal budget and compared to other items on the list (defense costs, political advertisements and toilet bowls) it's really nothing to mention.
Supposedly, e-mail between the company's server and the device is encrypted (although at one time, there were some protests to using Blackberries because the messages pass through RIM's servers which were located somewhere in Canada - I don't know if that's still the case).
So you first say that profiles on a network have to be limited, then you say they can be terabytes large?
DirectRT, E-Prime, Presentation, MATLAB (for some toolboxes)...
OD can provide 'group policies' too. You just apply the resource management to a group - that's all 'group policies' is, management of groups. Load balancing can be done on Open Directory it's called replica's. Open Directory has multi-master Kerberos across all replica's and there is the possibility for LDAP relays for remote offices or if you just have a lot of load. All other services can be load balanced as well, it's just a matter of having an admin with half a clue. 'Trusts' between directories can be established as well (I believe you're talking about cross-authentication). You seem to forget that Microsoft just established AD on the open and free technologies called LDAP and Kerberos, ran it over some proprietary protocol and then gave some management tools for it. There is nothing AD can do that you can't do in standard LDAP and Kerberos.
Oh yeah, that's really cool. Sorry but you can't get a profile larger than 100MB, yeah we have multi-terabyte systems but you can't use them conveniently. I have one user that currently has a home directory of 1.2TB on her Mac and it does it without complaining, the user doesn't even notice it's on the network.
As far as the admin point, some software doesn't run without being an admin. Most non-mainstream software will require your user to be an admin. Most if not all research software will require your user to be an admin. For some or another reason, elevating privileges was not something that has been engrained into the operating system (most Unix-based software can elevate right from within the program when you need the functionality) but rather something that has been tacked on later and it's an all-or-nothing deal so you need it before starting a program and it's not trivial to do so either (if it works at all)
Mac's have something like Active Directory, it's called Open Directory (based on OpenLDAP) and it can do the same stuff AD does. It even integrates with AD if you really need it to augment AD.
Yes, you've seen systems from TigerDirect and NewEgg that you halfly build yourself that are half the price of a Mac. Building it yourself in a business setting is just not possible unless you're willing to employ somebody to do it for you at which point the savings evaporate very quickly. I do it too for my home, I can build the machine however it takes me a few hours. My after-tax income is about $30/h but I'm sure I cost a lot more than that not to talk about what else I could be doing instead of building computers.
However feature-by-feature workstations or laptops from Dell or HP (or anywhere you can get a decent volume and support) are quite a bit more expensive than Apple machines. For some beefy configurations this difference is more than a few $1000. For us (Educational & Research Institution) it's actually cheaper to buy an Apple machine to run purely Windows than to get a Dell to do the same.
And how much do you think it costs us if a machine is not working? Currently ~$500/hours of immediate costs for some of our systems (luckily we have hot-standby for it). Apple will send somebody to my place right away if something goes wrong, I spend less than 15 minutes at the phone and replacement parts arrive within 24 hours. If really necessary, I drive down to an Apple Service Center or Apple Store with the machine and they'll fix it the same day. Dell can do NBD On-Site as well but as I noticed, for anything that isn't a hard drive they'll first have to ship you or the shop the replacement parts which apparently come through UPS Ground. For laptops it's even worse, Dell expects you to find a box and ship it to them yourself after which they'll ship you a replacement (3-5 business days) while Apple will overnight you a box with a brand new system that you can send back with the old system right away.