Modesty and sexual conservatism, which are not unique to the Chinese culture, but rather understood and appreciated by almost all [organized] societies.
Well, i don't know what you classify as "sexual conservatism", but i sure don't think that we have that now - neither in the US nor here in Europe.
Porn is everywhere and completely legal, prostitution is legal in most places in Europe and some places in the US.
12 year olds that want to dress up as whores as the idols on TV also dress like that isn't my idea of "sexual conservatism".
However, sex is often a somewhat "taboo" topic, which leads to problems like teenage pregnancies, transmission of STDs, etc.
I disagree. Windows administration is as challenging as Linux, sometimes made more difficult by red tape and corporate bullshit.
Pure usage of an administrated machine is the same, of course if you already know Windows it'll be easier to use Windows again than to relearn the differences in Windows's and Linux's idiosyncrasies.
This is probably less than a month's work to write. But it hasn't been done yet. It needs to be done. There needs to be an extremely friendly interview/installation process for linux to take it to the next level.
Because it's not really interesting work, and it's a stupid idea in general.
Administrating a computer in this day and age requires knowledge and skill. It always like: Just like maintaining a car. There will not be a car in the next 20 years that requires ABSOLUTELY NO MAINTENANCE.
You can either learn to do it on your own, or you can pay someone else to do it.
It's a waste of CPU, memory, and disk. That's not green at all. If your hardware can handle both servers, just run them both on the same copy of the OS. That's what the OS is there for!
In theory, you're right - in practice, you're wrong.
The problem here is that many important LOB applications are only supported in very specific conditions, which usually makes it necessary to dedicate an OS to the application.
Most of the Microsoft infrastructure also requires or recommends several OS instances to run most of their software.
Segregating applications into their own OS instances is also a good idea anyway, as it eases troubleshooting and removes negative interactions between applications running in the same OS instance.
If you do not run any Microsoft software, you'll probably have less of a need for virtualization - as it solves many problems that were created by both Microsoft and most of the 3rd party vendors that surround MS.
There is additional flexibility gained from virtualization, like VMware DRM, VMware DRS, VMotion, Storage Vmotion. These can give you advantages no single server can give you.
Why is this sham movement getting attention in the technical community? I'm not saying this as a troll, I honestly want to know -- how can you people as engineers and scientists look at this and say that any aspect of this so-called movement is objective?
There are several aspects of the whole "Green IT" thing that make sense no matter how you put them.
Examples: * Virtualization makes your IT more flexible and requires less hardware (= less cost) * Faster computers that require less power (= higher density, less energy cost, etc.)
But yes, you're right. I never understood the leftist/green crap we've been seeing for the past few years - and it's getting worse.
Seriously, we rolled IE7 out a few weeks after release, after verifying all the apps we needed were working.
Yep, we killed the Phishing Filter, removed the annoying first-startup page, and set Google as the default search engine, but that's all easy stuff thanks to group policies.
Oh good god, i had a hard time reading this. No blanks before punctuation, dammit.
There is no such thing as free lunch - making a good office suite is hard and thankless job, because for a rather big part, it's not interesting work.
There are many projects where this is different and some projects also hire people that the boring stuff gets done too.
OOo doesn't fit in anywhere anymore: It doesn't fit in on Vista, and it doesn't fit in on OS X.
There's not interest for it in the Business world - smaller companies don't have the resources to support it, and IT services company have no interest in not selling Microsoft Office licenses. Larger companies don't seem to be interested, but i have no idea why, probably because of complicated deployment, lack of group policy support, and lack of support for traditional office extensions, macros, etc.
Can this solution be used without an Active Directory environment?
No.
There are plenty of organisations out there using other authentication, authorisation and trustee management mechanisms, just wondering what their options might be.
No idea, sorry. Adobe also offers some DRM with their Adobe Acrobat / Acrobat Reader Suite, but the question specifically stated that they used MS Office, for which AD RMS probably is the best bet.
AD RMS provides you with the ability to control licensing, opening, printing, etc. of documents. This will provide you with the audit trail you migh tneed.
Of course, you can still photograph every screen while scrolling through the pages, so it's essentially worthless in practice, but it might satisfy your customers demands for proper paperworks.
Yep, implementing AD RMS will be a heck a lot of work, and you'll surely need to adjust your internal processes in order to incorporate AD RMS.
What you're planning on doing is DRM: Which is, as all Slashdot readers know, impossible with a properly determined person. And in your case (industrial espionage), there are better people working on it than a few hackers that try cracking Blue-Ray in their spare time.
Yes, we reimage all our company laptops with Vista Enterprise (Thanks to SA!) in order to use BitLocker, and then install the necessary vendor tools (in our case: Lenovo).
This has proven to be stable, and the users have learned to work with it (we've configured UAC to always prompt u:pw, which is even more annoying, but it actually makes you stop and think instead of cancel/allow).
By now, 3/4 of our staff is running on Vista. We've migrated to Office 2007 earlier.
Deployment in Vista has definitivly become better, and with the other infrastructure improvements we got from upgrading our servers to Windows Server 2008, productivity has come up.
One of the most undervalued features IMO is SMB 2.0: VPN Access to file shares is now as quick as local browsing, and downloading files can actually max out our internet uplink.
No, Vista isn't as good as i hoped it to be, but it is an improvement over XP in many aspects, especially deployment.
You're making the mistake of confusing work budgets with personal budgets.
For example, i don't consider 10'000 US$ for a decent messaging server expensive. However, i would consider 10'000 US$ very much money if i had to pay for it out of my own pocket.
Add to the fact that EVERY company i've EVER been seen doesn't license their software correctly (which is very easy, since a lot (but not all) company-only software has no DRM or licensing enforcement), for example consider Microsoft CALs or mishandling of product usage rights (e.G. deploying images without having a volume license + software assurance).
And don't forget the "enthusiast" home users that needs nothing less than Photoshop to edit the poorly shot pictures he took with a $200 digital camera.
I have no idea about german medical regulations, but can't they be satisfied with a site to site VPN, a seperate PC in the home (behind it's own firewall) and full disk encryption?
Or, if possible, work using terminal services? The data never leaves the office...
Something we are doing, and is working rather well IMHO, is working from home.
It doesn't make you unavailable for the company, so you can pick up the phone when needed, but you can also plan your day a lot more relaxed.
As a small business, we build on the trust principle here, and expect thing to work okay without any control measures in place - i think this is completely acceptable, especially if you have a motivated workforce.
Our developers and sales personnel like working this way (one or two day per week from home, with flexible scheduling). However, for customer facing personnel and/or system engineers, this wouldn't work so well as physical presence is required in many cases.
Especially in small businesses, part time work can be deadly for productivity.
When you only have a handful of people, there is usually less enforcement of proper procedures and documentation, leading to situations where only a single person can help with certain issues fast - of course, other people would be able to figure it out too, but need more time to immerse them into the situation.
For example, i have a few customers with which i work every week. I keep the documentation up-to-date, but it doesn't change the fact that i know their infrastructure by heart and don't have to look up most of the stuff.
So when i take a day off, people have either to choice of investing 30-60-90 minutes of reading docs and familiarizing themselves with something, or calling me and getting an answer in 5 minutes.
Of course my coworkers respect my time off, but customers don't. This can lead to nasty situations, which is why i think part timing is a big problem.
Of course in big, faceless corporations, it matters less, as employee morale is basically nonexistant.
I solved that by installing a extension that disabled compatibility checks.
I think they're a bit overzealous regarding compatibility checks, mostly because i think that the more careful approach causes more harm than a less careful one.
Yellownet E-Finance (Swiss finance institute, online banking application) Kanton Zurich Tax Application
Both are java, but the Linux variant is unpackaged.
Depending on what kind of hardware you're running graphics or WLAN drivers, as distributions always seem to lag behind new hardware releases.
Things get worse if you're an "ordinary user" and want to run current applications on a 3 year old Linux installation. Which works perfectly fine on Windows, but Ubuntu and co. are different here.
One big difference for most Linux users though, is that probably all of the software they'll need to use their computer is available from a single, trusted source: their distribution's repositories.
Which works only in theory - there are many cases where you have to download software seperately, compile it on your own, install it somehow.
But i'll agree on the general point with you: software packaging and automating is a really big mess on Windows. Enterprises buy lots of software and needs lots of personnel just to simply repackage software for proper deployment.
But actually your right about smaller companies being more progressive in one regard, they are more willing and able to ditch Windows and go with alternatives.
Which is exactly what i would recommend to anyone who dislikes Vista - if you don't like where Microsoft is going: Switch!
sudo evil_service (runs in the backgrounds, installs itself into the init system) and then do evil_program that uses some IPC mechanism to talk to evil_service, how is this different from UAC?
Slashdot Mirror
Well, i don't know what you classify as "sexual conservatism", but i sure don't think that we have that now - neither in the US nor here in Europe.
Porn is everywhere and completely legal, prostitution is legal in most places in Europe and some places in the US.
12 year olds that want to dress up as whores as the idols on TV also dress like that isn't my idea of "sexual conservatism".
However, sex is often a somewhat "taboo" topic, which leads to problems like teenage pregnancies, transmission of STDs, etc.
I've never seen a Windows user without a technical background being able to do things like sharing a printer.
I disagree. Windows administration is as challenging as Linux, sometimes made more difficult by red tape and corporate bullshit.
Pure usage of an administrated machine is the same, of course if you already know Windows it'll be easier to use Windows again than to relearn the differences in Windows's and Linux's idiosyncrasies.
Because it's not really interesting work, and it's a stupid idea in general.
Administrating a computer in this day and age requires knowledge and skill. It always like: Just like maintaining a car. There will not be a car in the next 20 years that requires ABSOLUTELY NO MAINTENANCE.
You can either learn to do it on your own, or you can pay someone else to do it.
40 outlets. I hope.
In theory, you're right - in practice, you're wrong.
The problem here is that many important LOB applications are only supported in very specific conditions, which usually makes it necessary to dedicate an OS to the application.
Most of the Microsoft infrastructure also requires or recommends several OS instances to run most of their software.
Segregating applications into their own OS instances is also a good idea anyway, as it eases troubleshooting and removes negative interactions between applications running in the same OS instance.
If you do not run any Microsoft software, you'll probably have less of a need for virtualization - as it solves many problems that were created by both Microsoft and most of the 3rd party vendors that surround MS.
There is additional flexibility gained from virtualization, like VMware DRM, VMware DRS, VMotion, Storage Vmotion. These can give you advantages no single server can give you.
Virtual desktops or terminal servers.
There are several aspects of the whole "Green IT" thing that make sense no matter how you put them.
Examples:
* Virtualization makes your IT more flexible and requires less hardware (= less cost)
* Faster computers that require less power (= higher density, less energy cost, etc.)
But yes, you're right. I never understood the leftist/green crap we've been seeing for the past few years - and it's getting worse.
An internal testing machine that's still on 2.6.21 crashed this night at around 01:00:00 CET.
Production machines with newer kernels didn't have any issues.
There's only one solution: You have to kill him.
Seriously, we rolled IE7 out a few weeks after release, after verifying all the apps we needed were working.
Yep, we killed the Phishing Filter, removed the annoying first-startup page, and set Google as the default search engine, but that's all easy stuff thanks to group policies.
In my experience, users are confused by ANY change. And not just IT - everywhere. Even a new toaster may lead to strange results.
Most people in IT just have accepted that something learned a year ago may be worthless in another year - but most people disagree with that.
Oh good god, i had a hard time reading this. No blanks before punctuation, dammit.
There is no such thing as free lunch - making a good office suite is hard and thankless job, because for a rather big part, it's not interesting work.
There are many projects where this is different and some projects also hire people that the boring stuff gets done too.
OOo doesn't fit in anywhere anymore: It doesn't fit in on Vista, and it doesn't fit in on OS X.
There's not interest for it in the Business world - smaller companies don't have the resources to support it, and IT services company have no interest in not selling Microsoft Office licenses. Larger companies don't seem to be interested, but i have no idea why, probably because of complicated deployment, lack of group policy support, and lack of support for traditional office extensions, macros, etc.
No.
No idea, sorry. Adobe also offers some DRM with their Adobe Acrobat / Acrobat Reader Suite, but the question specifically stated that they used MS Office, for which AD RMS probably is the best bet.
The best solution to your problem probably would be using Microsoft's AD RMS.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc753531.aspx
AD RMS provides you with the ability to control licensing, opening, printing, etc. of documents. This will provide you with the audit trail you migh tneed.
Of course, you can still photograph every screen while scrolling through the pages, so it's essentially worthless in practice, but it might satisfy your customers demands for proper paperworks.
Yep, implementing AD RMS will be a heck a lot of work, and you'll surely need to adjust your internal processes in order to incorporate AD RMS.
What you're planning on doing is DRM: Which is, as all Slashdot readers know, impossible with a properly determined person. And in your case (industrial espionage), there are better people working on it than a few hackers that try cracking Blue-Ray in their spare time.
Yes, we reimage all our company laptops with Vista Enterprise (Thanks to SA!) in order to use BitLocker, and then install the necessary vendor tools (in our case: Lenovo).
This has proven to be stable, and the users have learned to work with it (we've configured UAC to always prompt u:pw, which is even more annoying, but it actually makes you stop and think instead of cancel/allow).
By now, 3/4 of our staff is running on Vista. We've migrated to Office 2007 earlier.
Deployment in Vista has definitivly become better, and with the other infrastructure improvements we got from upgrading our servers to Windows Server 2008, productivity has come up.
One of the most undervalued features IMO is SMB 2.0: VPN Access to file shares is now as quick as local browsing, and downloading files can actually max out our internet uplink.
No, Vista isn't as good as i hoped it to be, but it is an improvement over XP in many aspects, especially deployment.
It's not as easy as you're trying to make it.
IE7 is an interactive graphical application.
Try running e.G. Konqueror in chroot, and restrict it from interacting with other programs in the same X session.
You're making the mistake of confusing work budgets with personal budgets.
For example, i don't consider 10'000 US$ for a decent messaging server expensive. However, i would consider 10'000 US$ very much money if i had to pay for it out of my own pocket.
Add to the fact that EVERY company i've EVER been seen doesn't license their software correctly (which is very easy, since a lot (but not all) company-only software has no DRM or licensing enforcement), for example consider Microsoft CALs or mishandling of product usage rights (e.G. deploying images without having a volume license + software assurance).
And don't forget the "enthusiast" home users that needs nothing less than Photoshop to edit the poorly shot pictures he took with a $200 digital camera.
I have no idea about german medical regulations, but can't they be satisfied with a site to site VPN, a seperate PC in the home (behind it's own firewall) and full disk encryption?
Or, if possible, work using terminal services? The data never leaves the office...
Something we are doing, and is working rather well IMHO, is working from home.
It doesn't make you unavailable for the company, so you can pick up the phone when needed, but you can also plan your day a lot more relaxed.
As a small business, we build on the trust principle here, and expect thing to work okay without any control measures in place - i think this is completely acceptable, especially if you have a motivated workforce.
Our developers and sales personnel like working this way (one or two day per week from home, with flexible scheduling). However, for customer facing personnel and/or system engineers, this wouldn't work so well as physical presence is required in many cases.
Especially in small businesses, part time work can be deadly for productivity.
When you only have a handful of people, there is usually less enforcement of proper procedures and documentation, leading to situations where only a single person can help with certain issues fast - of course, other people would be able to figure it out too, but need more time to immerse them into the situation.
For example, i have a few customers with which i work every week. I keep the documentation up-to-date, but it doesn't change the fact that i know their infrastructure by heart and don't have to look up most of the stuff.
So when i take a day off, people have either to choice of investing 30-60-90 minutes of reading docs and familiarizing themselves with something, or calling me and getting an answer in 5 minutes.
Of course my coworkers respect my time off, but customers don't. This can lead to nasty situations, which is why i think part timing is a big problem.
Of course in big, faceless corporations, it matters less, as employee morale is basically nonexistant.
I solved that by installing a extension that disabled compatibility checks.
I think they're a bit overzealous regarding compatibility checks, mostly because i think that the more careful approach causes more harm than a less careful one.
For schools, yes, pretty much.
Which version? WSUS 3 has come a long way. I've used SUS back then, and god damn it, SUS sucked a lot of dick.
Yellownet E-Finance (Swiss finance institute, online banking application)
Kanton Zurich Tax Application
Both are java, but the Linux variant is unpackaged.
Depending on what kind of hardware you're running graphics or WLAN drivers, as distributions always seem to lag behind new hardware releases.
Things get worse if you're an "ordinary user" and want to run current applications on a 3 year old Linux installation. Which works perfectly fine on Windows, but Ubuntu and co. are different here.
Which works only in theory - there are many cases where you have to download software seperately, compile it on your own, install it somehow.
But i'll agree on the general point with you: software packaging and automating is a really big mess on Windows. Enterprises buy lots of software and needs lots of personnel just to simply repackage software for proper deployment.
Which is exactly what i would recommend to anyone who dislikes Vista - if you don't like where Microsoft is going: Switch!
I've used sudo, and think it's customizability would do great for Windows. It's clearly better than UAC in terms of configurability.
However, regarding security, my first Google hit was this:
http://www.theopensourcerer.com/2008/04/28/vista-uac-faux-security-or-what/
How does this issue not apply for sudo?
Assume i do
sudo evil_service
(runs in the backgrounds, installs itself into the init system)
and then do
evil_program
that uses some IPC mechanism to talk to evil_service, how is this different from UAC?