Very true. Local councils, especially, seem to only run IE6. There's a persistent 15-20% of our users who remain stubbornly on IE6 - this hasn't changed since this time last year, and all the inroads being made by IE8 are at the expense of IE7.
The word "republic" has a few more shades of meaning; from the Latin "res publica", or "public affairs", it implies that the affairs of the nation are the collective interests of its public citizens, rather than the private domain of a despotic monarch.
The US system of government is basically the British parliamentary system from c. 1780, replacing the monarch with a president and with greater and more formalised democracy. Certainly you guys seem to treat your presidents with far more respect that we treat our cretinous prime ministers...:)
Nice idea... I could install rdesktop and RDC into my main box whilst in the office given our current setup. This is in a way my main objection, though - these things are great tools/toys for us lot, but I strongly suspect that our regular users will get bored/frustrated of them and it'll be wasted money -- when I'm struggling to get a few hundred pounds for a better firewall and RAM upgrades for the servers:(
I wouldn't mind Blackberries if we had a proper server infrastructure set up; we even had a trial system arranged with O2 where they'd supply us a server and 5 handhelds to try out. Then the boss cancelled this ("HOW much for a server???"), went out and bought 3 handsets and dumped them on my desk saying "set these up". We've just about sorted them out, but they have a tendency to buy random packages for various suppliers which makes support a nightmare, and it's hard work sorting out the mess. My junior techs now scream slightly whenever anyone mentions the word "Blackberry"...
My boss plonked TWO of these bloody things on my desk just before Christmas, with a look of beaming pride on her face - one of them came in pink, y'see.
"Look! It comes in pink! It's so SMALL and CUTE! Aren't they cool? Are they any good? I bought two of them..."
She's now pestering me to buy one for every mobile user because their (dual-core, 2 GB, 7200 RPM, DVD-R, 1600x1280 Latitude D830) laptops are "too heavy". Except she doesn't like the operating system and wants XP on them all. I'm now in the process of tactfully telling her that this is not going to happen... it'd be worse than the f***ing Blackberries they keep buying and expecting us to fix.
I completely agree about the guild structure; IT lends itself very well to an apprentice/journeyman/master structure. In fact we use Jedi ranks at work (internally, at least), with me as Yoda, my software architect as Obi Wan, our best coders as knights and the new ones as padawans. Mind you, that only works because most of us know Star Wars:)
...and most of our other mobile workers. 192.168.1.x is just too widely used; however, good point on using a more obscure 10.x.x.x address, I may well do that. As for changing the directors, there's politics involved unfortunately.
Lucky you - I'm pulling a shift this Sunday to switch our internal IP range from 192.168.1.x to 10.0.x.x because our existing range clashes with 3 of the directors' home networks. After that, I'm putting together an IPv6 readiness committee 'cos I'm not going through this again...
The desktop you see is a combination of the All Users desktop and your own, personal desktop. A file in Vista placed in C:\Public\Desktop appears for all users, whereas one placed in C:\joe\Desktop only appears for Joe; the same goes for the start menu. Thus you can install a program and have it show up for all users, or just the current user.
The problem is that it's not possible to differentiate between which items are shared and which are personal, so there's no way to tell unless you try to delete them.
Just to be pedantic, the French Revolution was begun and led by well-off middle-class intellectuals, lawyers, teachers and capitalists, all of them urban.
Hell yes. My company deals with architects and designers on a daily basis (we collate information on construction projects), and ALL of them, from the smallest to the biggest, use DWG (with the *occasional* exception who use Visio or similar). Thankfully we don't have to generate DWG files, and thus we can use AutoDesk's free viewer (which, however, is a right pain in the arse to install).
Maybe Jackson should have taken out the long, rambling and largely pointless additions (the Warg riders/Arwen scenes in Two Towers) and concentrated on building up the characters.
Denethor was butchered by a script that turned him into a camp villain; the ents end up as a bunch of yokels and for all his horror credentials, PJ cannot "do" Darkness (the scenes at Dunharrow and Shelob's lair become garish B-movie fare rather than the dark terror conjoured up by the books).
Still great films, and obviously made by people who loved the books, but that only makes these problems stand out more.
Half the time, it'll run if you grant the Users group Modify permissions on the %ProgramFiles%\%App% folder. Otherwise, I feel your pain and advise you to look at Terminal Server...
We went with a Thompson SpeedTouch 504 (I think, I can't remember the exact model number). A very plain but sturdy router for about £55. I had exactly the same problem as you - I wanted a basic, non-NAT router since the "client" (a new company we were setting up) were using their server as a NAT router/firewall, and we wanted to plug an additional linux box into a public IP to run Wordpress for their website. So far it's never gone down since February, whereas I've gone through 3 NAT routers at home (D-Link, then Netgear, now Linksys - eventually I'll find a decent one!).
Two words: Group Policy. You can either a) go around each machine and change the Local Security Policy individually, or you can b) use GP to set default policies for users and computers. Not a big deal? How about assigning default startup scripts, setting up common paths for Office, locking down Control Panel, folder re-direction, etc etc.
We had a setup similar to the one you describe with our last sysadmin - we spent all day running around fixing things, and when someone left, we had another couple of hours setting up a new profile and scrubbing the old one; password management was also a nightmare when we had people moving from one computer to the other.
If you have a Windows server, have a domain; if not, it's your loss.
Why not? What, actual, business benefit does Samba bring that SBS cannot provide? SBS is not designed to join a domain, that's the point of having it - what you're trying to do is use it as a member server, which it isn't designed for. Either persuade your company to fork out for the full licenses of all the Microsoft software, or just swallow your pride and use the damn thing -- I promise it isn't that bad. Samba will provide you with no extra benefits, and you'll be unable to use Group Policies to make your life easier.
A Samba server can, in fact, join the domain, as can other Windows servers. You cannot have sub-domains or trusts, although you can technically have a fail-over domain controller.
I created a decent SQL schema for our asset-tracking system, which has basic fault and maintenance logging for computers, but is more geared towards managing our licensing. Currently there's no front end and I do all the work using SProcs and views. Lesson here is: building such a system is more complicated than you think, and you will most likely fall into scope-creep!
That said, does anyone know a way of automatically detecting software packages installed on a Windows PC?
If your bosses will shell out for it, then Visual Studio 2005's Integration Services can take data from any number of MDBs, Excel files, text files, databases, etc and transform them into whatever you want. We recently used it to move a creaking Access DB (1 table, 165 columns!!!) into a (temporary, and slightly more normalised) SQL Server schema - we had cursors running to generate keys, data cleansing procedures plugged in, and best of all it ran at the click of a button, so we could test it very easily with copies of the data before the final rollout.
Config files... we could build a big, centralised database of them, maybe split into user and computer, with the user having rights over their own section but not the computer... and we could call it... THE REGISTRY.
If on the other hand they are functions of a high enough level of complexity that combining then still results in pretty much only being able to do changes to the data as the application would (eg, a transfer_money method which "checks the debitors balance, takes money from the debitor's account and places it on the creditors account"), then you've just moved you business logic to the database thus openning a whole new Pandora's box.
I would have defined that as data logic, personally. Business logic might define, for example, alerts on money transfers, whereas actually performing the transfer (send X amount from A's account to B's account) sounds like data logic - additionally, if working in a large team, the programmers can safely use this method without knowing all the database complexity (in a financial application such as your example they may not have access rights to the tables either).
If you used SQL92 (as in, standard SQL) and were not relying on vendor specific database access libraries you won't have to change a single piece of database access code in your app when changing databases. This is of course dependent on the language you're using for the core application and the database libraries available in that language.
For example, in Java, using the standard libraries all you would have to do is load a different driver class and use a different connection URL.
Fair point - but what if you changed the database structure, but not the data logic? If you have your transfer_money sproc, then your database devs can safely modify this to take account of the new data structure without having to modify the business objects.
Scenario: You move from SQL Server to Oracle. You use sprocs, so the only communication you do with the database is to pass parameters too/from said sprocs.
Now, if you'd been using SQL from your object layer, you'd have had to re-write all the SQL code in the application. If, however, you used sprocs, you simply re-write them all, then change your data access layer's setting to use Oracle. Your application is now completely unaware of the change and requires minimal re-writing.
You're also ignoring what happens when a business object (say, a customer order) is split over 3 or 4 tables in the database: using a sproc can give you a nice, simple interface to those tables so your developers don't have to worry about the underlying database structure.
Also, SECURITY. If you use SQL, then you give your application blanket rights to execute arbitrary code. Assuming it's compromised, an attacker could run any code they wanted on your database. Using sprocs, they can only run those procedures which the application is allowed to run.
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Very true. Local councils, especially, seem to only run IE6. There's a persistent 15-20% of our users who remain stubbornly on IE6 - this hasn't changed since this time last year, and all the inroads being made by IE8 are at the expense of IE7.
The word "republic" has a few more shades of meaning; from the Latin "res publica", or "public affairs", it implies that the affairs of the nation are the collective interests of its public citizens, rather than the private domain of a despotic monarch. The US system of government is basically the British parliamentary system from c. 1780, replacing the monarch with a president and with greater and more formalised democracy. Certainly you guys seem to treat your presidents with far more respect that we treat our cretinous prime ministers... :)
Nice idea... I could install rdesktop and RDC into my main box whilst in the office given our current setup. This is in a way my main objection, though - these things are great tools/toys for us lot, but I strongly suspect that our regular users will get bored/frustrated of them and it'll be wasted money -- when I'm struggling to get a few hundred pounds for a better firewall and RAM upgrades for the servers :(
I wouldn't mind Blackberries if we had a proper server infrastructure set up; we even had a trial system arranged with O2 where they'd supply us a server and 5 handhelds to try out. Then the boss cancelled this ("HOW much for a server???"), went out and bought 3 handsets and dumped them on my desk saying "set these up". We've just about sorted them out, but they have a tendency to buy random packages for various suppliers which makes support a nightmare, and it's hard work sorting out the mess. My junior techs now scream slightly whenever anyone mentions the word "Blackberry"...
My boss plonked TWO of these bloody things on my desk just before Christmas, with a look of beaming pride on her face - one of them came in pink, y'see.
"Look! It comes in pink! It's so SMALL and CUTE! Aren't they cool? Are they any good? I bought two of them..."
She's now pestering me to buy one for every mobile user because their (dual-core, 2 GB, 7200 RPM, DVD-R, 1600x1280 Latitude D830) laptops are "too heavy". Except she doesn't like the operating system and wants XP on them all. I'm now in the process of tactfully telling her that this is not going to happen... it'd be worse than the f***ing Blackberries they keep buying and expecting us to fix.
I completely agree about the guild structure; IT lends itself very well to an apprentice/journeyman/master structure. In fact we use Jedi ranks at work (internally, at least), with me as Yoda, my software architect as Obi Wan, our best coders as knights and the new ones as padawans. Mind you, that only works because most of us know Star Wars :)
...and most of our other mobile workers. 192.168.1.x is just too widely used; however, good point on using a more obscure 10.x.x.x address, I may well do that. As for changing the directors, there's politics involved unfortunately.
Lucky you - I'm pulling a shift this Sunday to switch our internal IP range from 192.168.1.x to 10.0.x.x because our existing range clashes with 3 of the directors' home networks. After that, I'm putting together an IPv6 readiness committee 'cos I'm not going through this again...
The desktop you see is a combination of the All Users desktop and your own, personal desktop. A file in Vista placed in C:\Public\Desktop appears for all users, whereas one placed in C:\joe\Desktop only appears for Joe; the same goes for the start menu. Thus you can install a program and have it show up for all users, or just the current user.
The problem is that it's not possible to differentiate between which items are shared and which are personal, so there's no way to tell unless you try to delete them.
Damn, beat me to it...
Hmm, I wonder if the Elder Ones patented Shoggoth technology?
Oh c'mon, you LOVE sitting there watching ESEUTIL's little defrag counter not move for four hours...
. . . .
Just to be pedantic, the French Revolution was begun and led by well-off middle-class intellectuals, lawyers, teachers and capitalists, all of them urban.
Hell yes. My company deals with architects and designers on a daily basis (we collate information on construction projects), and ALL of them, from the smallest to the biggest, use DWG (with the *occasional* exception who use Visio or similar). Thankfully we don't have to generate DWG files, and thus we can use AutoDesk's free viewer (which, however, is a right pain in the arse to install).
Maybe Jackson should have taken out the long, rambling and largely pointless additions (the Warg riders/Arwen scenes in Two Towers) and concentrated on building up the characters.
Denethor was butchered by a script that turned him into a camp villain; the ents end up as a bunch of yokels and for all his horror credentials, PJ cannot "do" Darkness (the scenes at Dunharrow and Shelob's lair become garish B-movie fare rather than the dark terror conjoured up by the books).
Still great films, and obviously made by people who loved the books, but that only makes these problems stand out more.
Half the time, it'll run if you grant the Users group Modify permissions on the %ProgramFiles%\%App% folder. Otherwise, I feel your pain and advise you to look at Terminal Server...
We went with a Thompson SpeedTouch 504 (I think, I can't remember the exact model number). A very plain but sturdy router for about £55. I had exactly the same problem as you - I wanted a basic, non-NAT router since the "client" (a new company we were setting up) were using their server as a NAT router/firewall, and we wanted to plug an additional linux box into a public IP to run Wordpress for their website. So far it's never gone down since February, whereas I've gone through 3 NAT routers at home (D-Link, then Netgear, now Linksys - eventually I'll find a decent one!).
Two words: Group Policy. You can either a) go around each machine and change the Local Security Policy individually, or you can b) use GP to set default policies for users and computers. Not a big deal? How about assigning default startup scripts, setting up common paths for Office, locking down Control Panel, folder re-direction, etc etc.
We had a setup similar to the one you describe with our last sysadmin - we spent all day running around fixing things, and when someone left, we had another couple of hours setting up a new profile and scrubbing the old one; password management was also a nightmare when we had people moving from one computer to the other.
If you have a Windows server, have a domain; if not, it's your loss.
Why not? What, actual, business benefit does Samba bring that SBS cannot provide? SBS is not designed to join a domain, that's the point of having it - what you're trying to do is use it as a member server, which it isn't designed for. Either persuade your company to fork out for the full licenses of all the Microsoft software, or just swallow your pride and use the damn thing -- I promise it isn't that bad. Samba will provide you with no extra benefits, and you'll be unable to use Group Policies to make your life easier.
A Samba server can, in fact, join the domain, as can other Windows servers. You cannot have sub-domains or trusts, although you can technically have a fail-over domain controller.
Excellent, thanks!
I created a decent SQL schema for our asset-tracking system, which has basic fault and maintenance logging for computers, but is more geared towards managing our licensing. Currently there's no front end and I do all the work using SProcs and views. Lesson here is: building such a system is more complicated than you think, and you will most likely fall into scope-creep!
That said, does anyone know a way of automatically detecting software packages installed on a Windows PC?
If your bosses will shell out for it, then Visual Studio 2005's Integration Services can take data from any number of MDBs, Excel files, text files, databases, etc and transform them into whatever you want. We recently used it to move a creaking Access DB (1 table, 165 columns!!!) into a (temporary, and slightly more normalised) SQL Server schema - we had cursors running to generate keys, data cleansing procedures plugged in, and best of all it ran at the click of a button, so we could test it very easily with copies of the data before the final rollout.
Config files... we could build a big, centralised database of them, maybe split into user and computer, with the user having rights over their own section but not the computer... and we could call it... THE REGISTRY.
I would have defined that as data logic, personally. Business logic might define, for example, alerts on money transfers, whereas actually performing the transfer (send X amount from A's account to B's account) sounds like data logic - additionally, if working in a large team, the programmers can safely use this method without knowing all the database complexity (in a financial application such as your example they may not have access rights to the tables either).
Fair point - but what if you changed the database structure, but not the data logic? If you have your transfer_money sproc, then your database devs can safely modify this to take account of the new data structure without having to modify the business objects.
Scenario: You move from SQL Server to Oracle. You use sprocs, so the only communication you do with the database is to pass parameters too/from said sprocs.
Now, if you'd been using SQL from your object layer, you'd have had to re-write all the SQL code in the application. If, however, you used sprocs, you simply re-write them all, then change your data access layer's setting to use Oracle. Your application is now completely unaware of the change and requires minimal re-writing.
You're also ignoring what happens when a business object (say, a customer order) is split over 3 or 4 tables in the database: using a sproc can give you a nice, simple interface to those tables so your developers don't have to worry about the underlying database structure.
Also, SECURITY. If you use SQL, then you give your application blanket rights to execute arbitrary code. Assuming it's compromised, an attacker could run any code they wanted on your database. Using sprocs, they can only run those procedures which the application is allowed to run.