Doesn't Forefront also require you have a Windows Server 2003 or later with Forefront Endpoint Protection 2010 server and System Center Configuration Manager 2007? That'd end up being $$$$
We are running ForeFront (not sure of the version), and we don't require SCOM or anything else - just (as you mentioned) Windows Server 2003 or later in addition to the ForeFront licensing.
I have to note, we only really use it as we are MS Partners and as such get it for free...
To be honest one of the big attractions Dell has for me is their service and warranties. If anything on notebook or PC dies, you call their support line and then the next day you have a replacement part in your hands. Especially in your case, where you have hundreds of machines. Hardware failures on whiteboxes where you have to swop out the component, interface with the differernt suppliers, and sometimes wait up to a week for a replacement is going to eat up a LOT of your time. Eventually, I would speculate, the amount of extra time you spend on hardware support would be much, much more (in $) terms than what you saved by building cheaper PCs.
I actually find this to be a rather short sighed and arrogant comment.
With the amount of updates coming through these days its quite probably impractical for each person or organization to test them all. If you were to do that you would probably be testing patches all the time - and I assure you that in smaller organization this has a cost impact that is extremely difficult to justify.
Worse, imagine you didn't deploy a security update as soon as possible and you get hit by a malware attack - not fun.
And then there is Thunder City, a company operating from the Cape Town International airport in Cape Town, South Africa. Quoting from Wikipedia:
Thunder City is an aircraft operating and maintenance company based at the Cape Town International Airport in Cape Town, South Africa. It owns the largest civillian-owned collection of former military jet aircraft in the world. These aircraft are used to perform in airshows and can also be hired by the general public for novelty flights, including going supersonic and climbing to altitudes around 50 000 feet.
The company's other activities include upgrading older models of the Aerospatiale Puma helicopter with modern avionics and rennovating airframes and engines.
Admittedly there are no "big boys" like Migs, but personally I don't think the Electric Lighting or the Buccaneer is anything to be sneezed at...:)
"from a song ripped from your private CD collection"
1. Challenge it, 2. provide evidence that you, in fact, are in posession of that CD.
What about if you USED to have the CD, but you don't anymore? (It was stolen, broken, etc). I would imagine this is probably quite a massive loophole that one can use, but of course IANAL.
We had the exact same thing happen in South Africa. I cant remember the details, but about 3 or 4 years it came out that our 1 cent and 2 cent coins were too expensive too manufucture. The government then simply phased out these coins, and we have now been going without that for quite a while with no problems.
I stay in South Africa, and believe that this fact has quite a revelance to the topic being discussed. You see, South Africa is in the somewhat unique situation of being a 2nd world country, due to the fact that large parts of the country was left to slowly tick by on their own why smaller regions were actively developed - Apartheid of course.
From our perspective I am very sure that the $100 laptop project is a VERY GOOD THING. For instance, take the schooling system. Schools that, in the previous "regime", recieved a lot of funding from the government are mostly in a position to be able to provide subjects like Computer Studies - due to having computer labs.
The other schools, however, that were previously neglected, now needs this infrastructure too. Problem is, as we all know, computers and (proprietry) software is expensive (in a "developing country" sense) and there are also just so many of these schools out there that it really is a challenge for government. It is being done - I was for a small time involved in our Gauteng Online project, whose aim is to provide every school in Gauteng (previously the PWV region) with computer labs and to connect these to the internet. It seemed like a simple enough project, but when one starts thinking about the numbers involved it starts to become a bit daunting.
Say we look at a PC that would perhaps cost about $350 (I am converting here from our currencty ZAR so I am not sure what an average PC would cost in USD terms!) - ten PCs for ten schools already amount to $35000. Challenge this with a machine that will cost $100 - thats a saving of $25000 already!
And this is just one small factor that i think is relevant here - others include mobility which is always a good thing, the fact that it runs linux (more encouragement for innovation i believe!) etc etc.
What's annoying about the UAC implementation in Vista is that it's so heavy-handed and intrusive -- and it halts what you're doing, even if you want to do something as simple as change your clock.
Something which has always triggered a small iritation in me is this whole 'clock' issue. Early in my road with NT I discovered that the requirement that one needs local administrative rights to change the time on a machine seems to have been a niggling issue. Make no mistake, for quite a long time I was one of those who viciously complained about this 'feature'. A while back, however, when I started playing with the DRM in Office 2003, the light suddenly went on for me regarding this little problem. If you think about this a bit more careful, the administrative-rights requirement actually makes sense - specifically if you take DRM into consideration
Now, I know this is Slashdot, and I know that the mere fact that I seem to be positive about DRM in this post will probably cause this post to be modded down into the "Centre of the Earth". I would ask these modders, however, just to step back a bit and think of a bigger picture here. In terms of DRM, in the MS Office sense, its actually very very useful. If you think of any normal company, and consider the amounts of confidential information that travels over email and in documents in this company, it should become clear that any way of protecting this content should be very valuable. Using Office DRM one can protect Emails and documents with various different restrictions, but the one that is relevant to this little rant of mine, is the option to put an expiry date on electronic content. Now obviously if Joe bloggs in Contoso Ltd can change the clock on his machine to enable him to see documents long after he was supposed to, DRM will be quite useless. It is for this reason, in my mind, that the requirement for someone to have administrative rights on a machine to change the clock is a basic but quite necessary requirement.
Yep, another vote for IMF from my side. We have a SpamAssassin that does scanning before it comes into the Exchange system, with IMF running at the Exchange gateway - and guess what, IMF actually catches Spam that SpamAssasin misses!
Nice features include a new 'Paint' and needed redesigned network center."
They could at least have included screenshots of the new features spefically mentioned in the blurb. I was actually looking forward to checking out the new paint...:(
I guess I will HAVE to install the new release now!
He completely indicted himself in his emails ("so I was sitting her occasionally triggering macros while I watched TV...").
a bit later in TFA he says the following:
One thing I forgot to mention here, which someone pointed out, is that my TV in this case is my 2nd computer. I have 2 19" screens next to eachother. One for the movie, one for WoW. So I wasn't away from the computer at all.
I notice too, that they haven't bought anyone out recently.
Actually, they are still pretty active on the buyout scene - one particular one that i am thinking about right now is the recent buyout of UMT Portfolio Management software see http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-5998084.html for more details.
You probably won't be very interested in this, but it is quite big actually (if only in my field) and is sure to give MS quite a boost in the Project and Portfolio Management software arenas
Not to mention it's an easy way to bypass any corporate website blocking too..
I really do apologize if i am being a total noob here - but afaik most companies will block just about all outgoing ports at the firewall - which means you won't be able to use Remote Desktop as it doesn't travel over port 80, but over port 443? Unless there is a way to tunnel this over HTTP - in which case would you please point me in the direction of some links that I can peruse?
Or maybe they just did some market research to find out which games are more popular than others - and decided to port those; in effect looking at everybody's Xbox games rack...:P
PS - For the people who don't know what i am talking about, South Africa has a history of taking a very long time to deploy advances in telecoms - mostly due to our EVIL incumbent Telco, Telkom making sure they are able to rape the South African Internet population for all they are worth. Which means that typically our Internet connectivity options plainly suck. For some more information on how bad they suck, you can visit Hellkom or MyADSL.
However, we have actually had 3G technology over here for quite a couple of months already.
Slashdot Mirror
Which clients are those? Outlook 2010 seems to handle it fine?
Doesn't Forefront also require you have a Windows Server 2003 or later with Forefront Endpoint Protection 2010 server and System Center Configuration Manager 2007? That'd end up being $$$$
We are running ForeFront (not sure of the version), and we don't require SCOM or anything else - just (as you mentioned) Windows Server 2003 or later in addition to the ForeFront licensing.
I have to note, we only really use it as we are MS Partners and as such get it for free...
To be honest one of the big attractions Dell has for me is their service and warranties. If anything on notebook or PC dies, you call their support line and then the next day you have a replacement part in your hands. Especially in your case, where you have hundreds of machines. Hardware failures on whiteboxes where you have to swop out the component, interface with the differernt suppliers, and sometimes wait up to a week for a replacement is going to eat up a LOT of your time. Eventually, I would speculate, the amount of extra time you spend on hardware support would be much, much more (in $) terms than what you saved by building cheaper PCs.
I actually find this to be a rather short sighed and arrogant comment.
With the amount of updates coming through these days its quite probably impractical for each person or organization to test them all. If you were to do that you would probably be testing patches all the time - and I assure you that in smaller organization this has a cost impact that is extremely difficult to justify.
Worse, imagine you didn't deploy a security update as soon as possible and you get hit by a malware attack - not fun.
And then there is Thunder City, a company operating from the Cape Town International airport in Cape Town, South Africa. Quoting from Wikipedia:
Admittedly there are no "big boys" like Migs, but personally I don't think the Electric Lighting or the Buccaneer is anything to be sneezed at... :)
What about if you USED to have the CD, but you don't anymore? (It was stolen, broken, etc). I would imagine this is probably quite a massive loophole that one can use, but of course IANAL.
It also means more people sitting on their asses doing nothing and getting fatter.
:P )
(like that will help the reputation that the Americans have...
Didn't they just open up a whole host of stuff?
The correct spelling is "Atheist".
We had the exact same thing happen in South Africa. I cant remember the details, but about 3 or 4 years it came out that our 1 cent and 2 cent coins were too expensive too manufucture. The government then simply phased out these coins, and we have now been going without that for quite a while with no problems.
:) )
Seems like a really good, simple suggestion.
In fact, there is a piece about this on wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_African_rand.
(seems like you can find something about everything on wikipedia these days...
I stay in South Africa, and believe that this fact has quite a revelance to the topic being discussed. You see, South Africa is in the somewhat unique situation of being a 2nd world country, due to the fact that large parts of the country was left to slowly tick by on their own why smaller regions were actively developed - Apartheid of course.
From our perspective I am very sure that the $100 laptop project is a VERY GOOD THING. For instance, take the schooling system. Schools that, in the previous "regime", recieved a lot of funding from the government are mostly in a position to be able to provide subjects like Computer Studies - due to having computer labs.
The other schools, however, that were previously neglected, now needs this infrastructure too. Problem is, as we all know, computers and (proprietry) software is expensive (in a "developing country" sense) and there are also just so many of these schools out there that it really is a challenge for government. It is being done - I was for a small time involved in our Gauteng Online project, whose aim is to provide every school in Gauteng (previously the PWV region) with computer labs and to connect these to the internet. It seemed like a simple enough project, but when one starts thinking about the numbers involved it starts to become a bit daunting.
Say we look at a PC that would perhaps cost about $350 (I am converting here from our currencty ZAR so I am not sure what an average PC would cost in USD terms!) - ten PCs for ten schools already amount to $35000. Challenge this with a machine that will cost $100 - thats a saving of $25000 already!
And this is just one small factor that i think is relevant here - others include mobility which is always a good thing, the fact that it runs linux (more encouragement for innovation i believe!) etc etc.
I don't think the parent was saying that he will be running it under linux.
Something which has always triggered a small iritation in me is this whole 'clock' issue. Early in my road with NT I discovered that the requirement that one needs local administrative rights to change the time on a machine seems to have been a niggling issue. Make no mistake, for quite a long time I was one of those who viciously complained about this 'feature'. A while back, however, when I started playing with the DRM in Office 2003, the light suddenly went on for me regarding this little problem. If you think about this a bit more careful, the administrative-rights requirement actually makes sense - specifically if you take DRM into consideration
Now, I know this is Slashdot, and I know that the mere fact that I seem to be positive about DRM in this post will probably cause this post to be modded down into the "Centre of the Earth". I would ask these modders, however, just to step back a bit and think of a bigger picture here. In terms of DRM, in the MS Office sense, its actually very very useful. If you think of any normal company, and consider the amounts of confidential information that travels over email and in documents in this company, it should become clear that any way of protecting this content should be very valuable. Using Office DRM one can protect Emails and documents with various different restrictions, but the one that is relevant to this little rant of mine, is the option to put an expiry date on electronic content. Now obviously if Joe bloggs in Contoso Ltd can change the clock on his machine to enable him to see documents long after he was supposed to, DRM will be quite useless. It is for this reason, in my mind, that the requirement for someone to have administrative rights on a machine to change the clock is a basic but quite necessary requirement.
The blurb links to the Digg page for the story, not the actual article: http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,125537,0 0.asp
Yep, another vote for IMF from my side. We have a SpamAssassin that does scanning before it comes into the Exchange system, with IMF running at the Exchange gateway - and guess what, IMF actually catches Spam that SpamAssasin misses!
a nge/downloads/2003/imf/default.mspx
Have a look at http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/exch
Now add Zombies into the mix.
Zombie pirate sniper ninjas.
OMG I think we all are going to die!
or iCurious... ;P
They could at least have included screenshots of the new features spefically mentioned in the blurb. I was actually looking forward to checking out the new paint... :(
I guess I will HAVE to install the new release now!
Regarding your sentence:
a bit later in TFA he says the following:
:P
Actually, they are still pretty active on the buyout scene - one particular one that i am thinking about right now is the recent buyout of UMT Portfolio Management software see http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-5998084.html for more details.
You probably won't be very interested in this, but it is quite big actually (if only in my field) and is sure to give MS quite a boost in the Project and Portfolio Management software arenas
Haha - i wanted to say the same thing. It is quite old news, imho, and not worth being modded so high :\
Haha - same here, although I thought the string was supposed to slow the machine down or something (to generate less heat)...
Or maybe they just did some market research to find out which games are more popular than others - and decided to port those; in effect looking at everybody's Xbox games rack... :P
...is actually ahead of the US - Amazing!
PS - For the people who don't know what i am talking about, South Africa has a history of taking a very long time to deploy advances in telecoms - mostly due to our EVIL incumbent Telco, Telkom making sure they are able to rape the South African Internet population for all they are worth. Which means that typically our Internet connectivity options plainly suck. For some more information on how bad they suck, you can visit Hellkom or MyADSL.
However, we have actually had 3G technology over here for quite a couple of months already.