Personally I've no problems with VMware. To me this smacks of the old rule "don't run mission critical servers on software under 6 months old". Deploying a 2 week old fix to live servers is just asking for trouble. I like to let other people find my bugs thanks.
30wpm? My sister used to have a chord-keyboard on a handheld computer called the Agenda years ago. It was bought for her because she was partially sighted, as a quick way to take notes in classes. The guy who demonstrated it could achieve 130wpm, they are phenominally fast. I was a 100+wpm touch typist at the time, and could nearly match that speed with this thing with a month or so of practice.
Forget typing speed, a good chord based keyboard user can hit speech speeds: "Many stenotype users can reach 300 words per minute" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chord_keyset
"War is about imposing YOUR will on your enemy." "it is the insurgents who cynically hide behind an unarmed populace"
Interesting comments. Ever thought how many insurgents there would be if Americans weren't trying to impose their will on the 'enemy'?
And calling people under attack (some of whome may simply be defending their home and way of life) "cynically hiding" is a bit rich. If they came out in uniform as you're suggesting, the Americans would either shoot them, or arrest them and deport them to Guantanamo and hold / torture them for as long as they felt like. They can't win in uniform, they don't want the Americans there, what else are they to do?
I live in the UK, and I can tell you now, if the Americans tried the kind of shit they've pulled in Iraq over here you'd have just as many British "insurgents" causing trouble as they currently have Iraquis.
I disagree, zones are great, I just wish they'd implemented them better. We use zones as a quick way to enforce across the whole organisation which sites can and can't run scripts. The concept is superb, regular sites can't run scripts, activex, or anything. IT designated 'trusted' sites work fine.
Unfortunately, IE7 has made things a little more difficult:
- Pages with content from various zones no longer show up as 'mixed'. Since the upgrade to IE7, all sites only show the zone of the main URL, however the content runs according to the security zone for it's own source. It makes it almost impossible to work out whether a site can or can't run scripts, and you end up digging into the pages source code to work out what sites need adding to the trusted zones to get pages to work.
- Dynamic scripts added to a page in the 'trusted' zone, execute from the 'internet' zone. This is "by design"... The only workaround is to change the way the code works on the server.
- If you want to lock down the 'internet' zone, you will need to add "about:internet" to your 'trusted' zone
- You will also need to add res://ieframe.dll to your 'trusted' zone
I love the way everybody assumes there's little functionality:) We have over 100 software programs in use, it's just users have to ask IT to configure them.
But yes, we are looking at Thin Clients. Costs have finally come down to a point where they are competative with PC's, we're just waiting for the right SAN / NAS technology. We'll probably rolling them out to most people in 12 months. Unfortunately the CAD workstations won't work as thin clients yet.
lol, not at all. Users work comes first, otherwise I'm not doing my job am I. Haven't had any complaints at all, every web page users need for their job works, we have enough game sites working to keep them happy over lunch, and the programs they need for their job work perfectly because their computers aren't full of crap.
CD-ROM drives are disabled by disabling the windows device driver. Users don't have admin rights so they can't re-enable them. They used to be locked in the bios, with bios passwords. Never had a user try to work around that, but it's not a great solution. Disabling the driver is far neater.
We're using IE because our Intranet software requires it, no choice in that. However, with security zones and javascript disabled it's surprising how secure you can make it.
"You're a good way down the path of just not allowing the use of computers at all."
LOL. Network security doesn't mean it stops users working. Done well they don't even notice it. Our computers are controlled by IT, the staff know that, but they also know that the computers are their to help them in their jobs, and any requests are generally accommodated pretty quickly by IT.
Basic hardening of a windows system has stood us in good stead here. IE's locked down so sites can't run scripts. CD-ROM drives are disabled, users can't install USB thumb drives. All e-mails and internet access is filtered.
It's not perfect by a long shot, but it's good enough that we've not had a sniff of a virus or malware outbreak in getting on for three years now. Hell, we don't even consider it necessary to install most MS updates straight away. We let other people do the testing, and roll them out via WSUS 3-6 months later.
Well you can't very well juggle on your own in space, and I doubt Nasa would appreciate you bouncing balls off all the equipment, but you could probably learn to juggle 5 balls between two people.
Of course the trick is to work out a path where the balls won't collide, and to learn the direction to throw them in, but it'd make for a great publicity video if they worked it out:D
3 years? I've got disks in the office that are 6+ years old and so far every one we've had to go back to has read perfectly. Admitedly they're stored in proper CD wallets in a safe, but even so, 3 years is selling the medium a bit short.
I used silentpcreview as my guide for pretty much everything, although I'm running OpenSolaris so driver support limited me slightly. Total spec and price was:
Spec list (with prices from dabs.com and scan.co.uk): Antec P182 Tower Case: £67.04 Corsair 520HX PSU: £48.16 Gigabyte GA-MA69G-S3H Motherboard: £37.63 AMD Sempron 64 LE-1100, 1.9Ghz: £20.41 2x Kingston 1GB DDR2: £13 each 6x Western Digital Caviar 1TB WD10EACS: £144.94 each LG Black SATA DVD+/-RW: £15.99 Supermicro 8 port SATA controller: £62.10
Grand Total: £1,160.16 + VAT
A word of warning: The Antek case is an absolute swine to cable, be prepared to spend a good amount of time fighting with it as you're building the computer. The PSU mounts at the bottom too, so you need one with long cables for the motherboard power.
It looks like it's module too. That's also pretty cool. Ship em up a few at a time, and just bolt pieces together if you need a bit more pulling power.
And I can confirm that. We used six of them in a home NAS server based on that review. Six drives in an Antec P182 case and you can't even hear the thing when it turns on.
It was so quiet we took it to an empty office because we couldn't believe what we were hearing, and that's when we found the ticking of my watch is far louder than the noise this computer makes when booting. Awesome drives, and an awesome case. Would highly recommend them both.
As far as I'm concerned, educating users is part of my job. We deal with dozens of file formats here, adding multiple versions of Office documents to that would just be a nightmare when we have to send files out to third parties.
So any of our staff who have newer versions of office get shown how to save their documents as Office 2000 compatible files. They only need showing once, and it means I don't need to install compatibility packs on a hundred or so computers, nor do I have to worry about sub-contractors not being able to open documents either.
Sounds like something else that could do with being pointed out to the EU. Using their web presence to artificially tie people to their desktop monopoly. Yes, we all expect this from Microsoft, but it really shouldn't be allowed.
The weirdest moment I ever had was after several weeks of intense AVP gaming. As the Alien you have to constantly track which way is "down" so you know which way you're going to fall when you let go, it's tough to start with but after a while it becomes second nature. Then one morning I woke up and mentally checked which way was "down" before turning on the tap.
Oooh, someone using ZFS in production. We're looking into it at the moment, mind dropping me a line with how you're finding it? My slashdot username @hotmail.com will reach me.
I actually read something about being able to detect many additional magnetic fields on a drive if you really need to recover data. The trick is to dismantle it instead of using it's own read/write head. I think it was using a scanning electron microscope.
The gist of the article was that when data's stored for a long time, it has a detectable effect on the surrounding areas. So, no matter how many times you overwrite the data, the signature of the original is still detectable if you have sufficient resources to throw at it.
Was a fascinating read, but it was a long time ago when I read that, and I'm too lazy to google a link for you I'm afraid:-)
Yeah, driver support is a definate downside. However you don't need hardware raid and there are plenty of supported SATA cards out there. Plus, since this is a NAS box there's not exactly a lot you need in terms of drivers - so long as it boots and sees the network you're pretty much ok:)
So yes, it definately needs more planning than a linux box, but ZFS has more than enough benefits to make it worthwhile.
Buy a bog standard machine (just check you can get solaris drivers), a couple of cheap SATA drives (size doesn't matter, you can upgrade them or add more drives later), and install OpenSolaris. Mirror the drives with ZFS and you're done, or use raid-z if you have several drives.
Some of the benefits:
- Guaranteed data integrity
- Unlimited, instant snapshots for backup & recovery
- Samba gives access to windows users (and Sun are just adding CIFS in Samba too)
- With Samba, and Microsoft's Shadow Copy Client those snapshots integrate straight into explorer. Just right click a file or folder to restore previous versions. It's not quite Time Machine, but it's not bad.
- ZFS means adding drives, or upgrading to bigger drives is a piece of cake
- You can also export snapshots to an external disk for backups
- You can check the whole disk for errors, which will be automatically repaired
Whitebox desktops? Naaah. What you really want are a few Sun x4500's (http://www.sun.com/servers/x64/x4500/). Buy some 1TB or even 2TB drives a few years down the line and that's some serious storage!
Slashdot Mirror
Personally I've no problems with VMware. To me this smacks of the old rule "don't run mission critical servers on software under 6 months old". Deploying a 2 week old fix to live servers is just asking for trouble. I like to let other people find my bugs thanks.
Err... try again. VMware released ESX for free a few weeks ago. That fella's $5k estimate is looking more than a little out of date.
30wpm? My sister used to have a chord-keyboard on a handheld computer called the Agenda years ago. It was bought for her because she was partially sighted, as a quick way to take notes in classes. The guy who demonstrated it could achieve 130wpm, they are phenominally fast. I was a 100+wpm touch typist at the time, and could nearly match that speed with this thing with a month or so of practice.
Forget typing speed, a good chord based keyboard user can hit speech speeds:
"Many stenotype users can reach 300 words per minute"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chord_keyset
"War is about imposing YOUR will on your enemy."
"it is the insurgents who cynically hide behind an unarmed populace"
Interesting comments. Ever thought how many insurgents there would be if Americans weren't trying to impose their will on the 'enemy'?
And calling people under attack (some of whome may simply be defending their home and way of life) "cynically hiding" is a bit rich. If they came out in uniform as you're suggesting, the Americans would either shoot them, or arrest them and deport them to Guantanamo and hold / torture them for as long as they felt like. They can't win in uniform, they don't want the Americans there, what else are they to do?
I live in the UK, and I can tell you now, if the Americans tried the kind of shit they've pulled in Iraq over here you'd have just as many British "insurgents" causing trouble as they currently have Iraquis.
This is slashdot... home of geeks... think outside the box a little, then re-read the parent post.
I disagree, zones are great, I just wish they'd implemented them better. We use zones as a quick way to enforce across the whole organisation which sites can and can't run scripts. The concept is superb, regular sites can't run scripts, activex, or anything. IT designated 'trusted' sites work fine.
Unfortunately, IE7 has made things a little more difficult:
- Pages with content from various zones no longer show up as 'mixed'. Since the upgrade to IE7, all sites only show the zone of the main URL, however the content runs according to the security zone for it's own source. It makes it almost impossible to work out whether a site can or can't run scripts, and you end up digging into the pages source code to work out what sites need adding to the trusted zones to get pages to work.
- Dynamic scripts added to a page in the 'trusted' zone, execute from the 'internet' zone. This is "by design"... The only workaround is to change the way the code works on the server.
- If you want to lock down the 'internet' zone, you will need to add "about:internet" to your 'trusted' zone
- You will also need to add res://ieframe.dll to your 'trusted' zone
I love the way everybody assumes there's little functionality :) We have over 100 software programs in use, it's just users have to ask IT to configure them.
But yes, we are looking at Thin Clients. Costs have finally come down to a point where they are competative with PC's, we're just waiting for the right SAN / NAS technology. We'll probably rolling them out to most people in 12 months. Unfortunately the CAD workstations won't work as thin clients yet.
lol, not at all. Users work comes first, otherwise I'm not doing my job am I. Haven't had any complaints at all, every web page users need for their job works, we have enough game sites working to keep them happy over lunch, and the programs they need for their job work perfectly because their computers aren't full of crap.
CD-ROM drives are disabled by disabling the windows device driver. Users don't have admin rights so they can't re-enable them. They used to be locked in the bios, with bios passwords. Never had a user try to work around that, but it's not a great solution. Disabling the driver is far neater.
We're using IE because our Intranet software requires it, no choice in that. However, with security zones and javascript disabled it's surprising how secure you can make it.
"You're a good way down the path of just not allowing the use of computers at all."
LOL. Network security doesn't mean it stops users working. Done well they don't even notice it. Our computers are controlled by IT, the staff know that, but they also know that the computers are their to help them in their jobs, and any requests are generally accommodated pretty quickly by IT.
Basic hardening of a windows system has stood us in good stead here. IE's locked down so sites can't run scripts. CD-ROM drives are disabled, users can't install USB thumb drives. All e-mails and internet access is filtered.
It's not perfect by a long shot, but it's good enough that we've not had a sniff of a virus or malware outbreak in getting on for three years now. Hell, we don't even consider it necessary to install most MS updates straight away. We let other people do the testing, and roll them out via WSUS 3-6 months later.
Well you can't very well juggle on your own in space, and I doubt Nasa would appreciate you bouncing balls off all the equipment, but you could probably learn to juggle 5 balls between two people.
:D
Of course the trick is to work out a path where the balls won't collide, and to learn the direction to throw them in, but it'd make for a great publicity video if they worked it out
3 years? I've got disks in the office that are 6+ years old and so far every one we've had to go back to has read perfectly. Admitedly they're stored in proper CD wallets in a safe, but even so, 3 years is selling the medium a bit short.
I used silentpcreview as my guide for pretty much everything, although I'm running OpenSolaris so driver support limited me slightly. Total spec and price was:
Spec list (with prices from dabs.com and scan.co.uk):
Antec P182 Tower Case: £67.04
Corsair 520HX PSU: £48.16
Gigabyte GA-MA69G-S3H Motherboard: £37.63
AMD Sempron 64 LE-1100, 1.9Ghz: £20.41
2x Kingston 1GB DDR2: £13 each
6x Western Digital Caviar 1TB WD10EACS: £144.94 each
LG Black SATA DVD+/-RW: £15.99
Supermicro 8 port SATA controller: £62.10
Grand Total: £1,160.16 + VAT
A word of warning: The Antek case is an absolute swine to cable, be prepared to spend a good amount of time fighting with it as you're building the computer. The PSU mounts at the bottom too, so you need one with long cables for the motherboard power.
gaah, modular
It looks like it's module too. That's also pretty cool. Ship em up a few at a time, and just bolt pieces together if you need a bit more pulling power.
And I can confirm that. We used six of them in a home NAS server based on that review. Six drives in an Antec P182 case and you can't even hear the thing when it turns on.
It was so quiet we took it to an empty office because we couldn't believe what we were hearing, and that's when we found the ticking of my watch is far louder than the noise this computer makes when booting. Awesome drives, and an awesome case. Would highly recommend them both.
Just have a tiny gasoline powered heater. Job done :)
As far as I'm concerned, educating users is part of my job. We deal with dozens of file formats here, adding multiple versions of Office documents to that would just be a nightmare when we have to send files out to third parties.
So any of our staff who have newer versions of office get shown how to save their documents as Office 2000 compatible files. They only need showing once, and it means I don't need to install compatibility packs on a hundred or so computers, nor do I have to worry about sub-contractors not being able to open documents either.
Sounds like something else that could do with being pointed out to the EU. Using their web presence to artificially tie people to their desktop monopoly. Yes, we all expect this from Microsoft, but it really shouldn't be allowed.
The weirdest moment I ever had was after several weeks of intense AVP gaming. As the Alien you have to constantly track which way is "down" so you know which way you're going to fall when you let go, it's tough to start with but after a while it becomes second nature. Then one morning I woke up and mentally checked which way was "down" before turning on the tap.
Yeah, I took a break from playing after that.
Great post, makes me wish for a new mod type: pwn3d :-)
Oooh, someone using ZFS in production. We're looking into it at the moment, mind dropping me a line with how you're finding it? My slashdot username @hotmail.com will reach me.
I actually read something about being able to detect many additional magnetic fields on a drive if you really need to recover data. The trick is to dismantle it instead of using it's own read/write head. I think it was using a scanning electron microscope.
:-)
The gist of the article was that when data's stored for a long time, it has a detectable effect on the surrounding areas. So, no matter how many times you overwrite the data, the signature of the original is still detectable if you have sufficient resources to throw at it.
Was a fascinating read, but it was a long time ago when I read that, and I'm too lazy to google a link for you I'm afraid
Yeah, driver support is a definate downside. However you don't need hardware raid and there are plenty of supported SATA cards out there. Plus, since this is a NAS box there's not exactly a lot you need in terms of drivers - so long as it boots and sees the network you're pretty much ok :)
So yes, it definately needs more planning than a linux box, but ZFS has more than enough benefits to make it worthwhile.
Buy a bog standard machine (just check you can get solaris drivers), a couple of cheap SATA drives (size doesn't matter, you can upgrade them or add more drives later), and install OpenSolaris. Mirror the drives with ZFS and you're done, or use raid-z if you have several drives.
If you've not heard of ZFS, go read this: http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/zfs.jsp. I found out about it 4 weeks ago and it's pretty impressive.
Some of the benefits:
- Guaranteed data integrity
- Unlimited, instant snapshots for backup & recovery
- Samba gives access to windows users (and Sun are just adding CIFS in Samba too)
- With Samba, and Microsoft's Shadow Copy Client those snapshots integrate straight into explorer. Just right click a file or folder to restore previous versions. It's not quite Time Machine, but it's not bad.
- ZFS means adding drives, or upgrading to bigger drives is a piece of cake
- You can also export snapshots to an external disk for backups
- You can check the whole disk for errors, which will be automatically repaired
Whitebox desktops? Naaah. What you really want are a few Sun x4500's (http://www.sun.com/servers/x64/x4500/). Buy some 1TB or even 2TB drives a few years down the line and that's some serious storage!