I'm tempted to hope you're much older than my naught-and-twenty, because someone younger would hardly be justified in accusing me of having "a lot to learn in front of me." Then again, you have the same success with capitalization as 13-year-old texters.
Society and civilization are definitely "challenging" at best without government. But, I challenge the assertion that we should be angry only at corporations. They're just playing the game whose rules are decided by a corrupt government.
If only an incorruptible government can protect us, we're better off without any.
I understand the points you're making - but I think blame is placed perfectly as it is. "Corporations" (as if they're a single, monolithic entity) have been wildly successful within their intended purpose - make money.
Government, on the other hand, is characterized by failure, the largest of which is the one you mentioned - failure to regulate the Corporations.
Granting the legitimacy of both Corporation and Government, which should we be angry at? The Corporations at least were successful!
Linux on Windows on Mac actually came about through some fairly sane reasoning.
First, we needed a local server for imaging. "The" imaging server was in another building, and the bandwidth between the network stacks in each building isn't that impressive.
Second, we needed a faster computer than the bottom-of-the-barrel slimtower Pentium 4s that were deployed elsewhere. The art department on campus had a lab of those nice, dual quad-core Xeons. They were by far the fastest computers on campus, had 4 SATA bays and PCI express slots for eSATA riser cards, and dual gigabit ethernet. Good server hardware.
So, we just took one. I figured it's not really "stealing" since it belongs to the college either way.
After acquiring the Mac server, Windows Server 2008 R2 was a natural choice. Windows Deployment Services is just the best way to deploy Windows images, period. The college also had a dozen licenses they weren't using, so IT gave us one.
So, we have a Windows imaging server now. But, believe it or not, Windows Server 2008 R2 just sucks donkey balls for routing packets. As in, it more or less refuses to do it if it's also an Active Directory Domain Controller. Which it was, because Windows Deployment Services requires a Domain Controller, and the rest of the network is on Novell.
We also wanted a caching proxy anyways - we spent a lot of time patching Windows when we build new images, and we also repair student laptops. So, we threw an IPCop image on VirtualBox to use for routing, DNS, and update caching. (I am aware of WSUS, but it's overkill - we really don't care about manually approving every Windows hotfix when we're patching student laptops.)
Later, we wanted to set up a Wiki. Us student workers had pretty much set up the network in that building, and all of us graduate in a few weeks. So, we made another VM, installed CentOS, and set up a Wiki.
So, that's how you get Linux on Windows on Mac. And other than the fact that Window Server Backup simply does not support volumes larger than 2 TB, it's been an awesome setup.
If you add Solaris, you can then create a zone/container that is able run Linux binaries via ABI emulation.
That's ingenious - we could host our virtual machines inside the Linux version of VirtualBox, running on Solaris' ABI, which could in turn be virtualized on Server 2008 R2's HyperV running in Parallels on Mac OSX. Which, in turn, can now be run in VirtualBox.
I'm actually considering trying that, just to make the next generation of student workers cry. (I'm a graduating student worker; almost all of our current staff are graduating as well.)
You shudder, but I'll see you one better: Our primary server at work is some kind of Mac tower with two quad-core Xeon processors. It runs Windows Server 2008 R2 which in turn uses Virtual Box to host CentOS VMs for routing, DHCP/DNS, a LAMP stack, and a firewall.
Off-topic (that's your cue, moderator queue) but related to parent's sig:
I can't speak for computer engineering, but I'm a soon-to-be graduating computer science major. The curriculum was a lot of fun, but it's not software engineering - it's math. Until recently, it was just a concentration of our math major.
That means it's a lot of theory - data structures, algorithmic efficiency, set theory, relational algebra, Turing completeness, etc. It doesn't seem immediately applicable, but it's handy to know when (if! you could go into academia!) you start writing "real" code. Your solutions will be simpler and more elegant when you know the difference between a linked list and a stack.
Computer engineering sounds like hardware hacking. That's the opposite of proofs and pure thought-stuff. Good luck.
It is possible that I misunderstood what you meant by "re-image." I work for IT on campus, and we deploy it on our lab images. So, I can tell you that it doesn't reboot our computer labs at 2am, pull a 5 GB image off of fast ethernet, and restart.
It also doesn't keep a copy of the image in a hidden partition - we have images that take up more than half the size of the victim machine's hard drive; the technology that would make that possible would be more interesting than Deep Freeze itself.
A frozen computer works exactly as a normal computer does - you can save documents, delete Windows files, even format the disk. Except that your changes are magically gone upon rebooting, like the computer has "amnesia." Wikipedia says it works by redirecting writes to disk sectors, which makes sense. It might redirect writes to a "hidden" partition, because modifying a frozen partition offline causes weird behavior.
You carefully document the costs to buy a mac, but assume that an Android developer would already have some computer. That's not a fair comparison.
You have a point, but I think it is a fair comparison. Prospective iPhone developers are, well, developers. I don't know of a single developer that doesn't have any computer at all, but I know quite a few that don't have Macs. And, the "additional use" of an already-owned PC won't cost any extra until TPM adoption reaches critical mass.
If you already have a Macintosh, the cost to develop for iPhone over Android is the Apple developer fee. Otherwise, it's developer fee + Mac purchase.
Deep Freeze doesn't actually re-image the computer - if you save a file locally, it's gone when you reboot it. It probably keeps a buffer or something at the end of a frozen partition.
You can have it automatically reboot (thawed) to install Windows updates and run maintenance scripts.
This is a lot better on Vista/7. Legacy programs at high DPI are bitmap enlarged to maintain correct proportions. (Although yes, this does make some programs look fuzzy.) Smarter programs that handle DPI properly can set a flag in their application manifest if they handle different DPI properly..NET programs written using WPF are entirely vector based, and so scale to any resolution.
This was wonderful for my grandparents - they had been running XP at 640x480 because of their poor vision. When they got a Windows 7 computer, we ran the screen at its native resolution and just turned the DPI settings way down.
"Gun-toting" and "crazy" are orthogonal. While your coworkers are definitely both, you should be suspicious of anyone who wants to limit your capacity for self-defense.
If this game does sound like something you'd be interested in, join World 3 (the NA EST server). Whisper Zeal, Temple, or Danderfluff for an invite into the NakedAndPetrified alliance.
It depends on the model, but a lot of features need long-term storage. Things like "secure" printing, where you have to type in a PIN before it will release our document.
Other features like "print from the web interface" or "print from e-mail" (running on a server on the printer itself) need storage. Keeping a history can also make management easier - some people use it to keep track of who is using company printers for personal use.
I'm not surprised - there are all sorts of nifty things mere "copiers" do. They can store documents forever, especially "secure" ones that you have to release with a PIN. They provide network services - some include (hackable!) FTP servers.
HPs printers support SNMP, but usually in the most insecure method possible. One of the simpler things you can do (Google it, perhaps not using SNMP) is remotely change the LCD text and blink the status lights. I wrote a script that would make all the HP printers on campus flash an animated ASCII Kirby dance.
Print servers are just that - servers. But, they look like copiers, so they get thrown out with secrets.
Is this not the goal of code re-use? I mean, if there is no copyright violations, that's what ppl should do... Schools are always trying to make you implement retarded things anyway...
You re-use code to avoid "reinventing the wheel." The intent is to 1) save time developing what already exists, and 2) take advantage of all the debugging that was already done for you.
The goal of getting a CS degree is to understand what the fuck a wheel is. Copying from expert sex change is not going to make you a good computer scientist; it won't even make you a good software developer.
I was bicycling past a herd of cattle, and they all looked up and stared at me. They started wandering towards the road I was at, following me, but soon broke from "mosey" into full-out "walk." I sped up, and so did the cows - they were leaping, like giant, bloated, mooing rabbits, fully keeping pace with my bicycle.
Granted, I never had cancer, but I'd like to think I bicycle faster than cows. They were almost doing 20 miles an hour.
They're evil, too. My grandfather was a farmer back in the day. One day working in the fields, a door-to-door salesman drove up, through the field, to try to hawk something to him. My grandfather was annoyed, naturally, but the cows discovered his car and licked all the chrome off.
I'd be inclined to agree with your "proper system imaging/installation via something like an installation server" approach. If he has sufficient dollars, kittens blood, and vespene gas, he wants to set up Windows Deployment Server (a feature in 2008 R2.) Windows 7 images are almost completely hardware agnostic - you can build them in a virtual machine and deploy them to real hardware if you want, as long as you stick the appropriate drivers on the server.
XP is a different story; it's so hardware bound it's not even funny. If you Sysprep an XP image, ghost/dd/imagex/whatever will probably let you move it to different hardware. Except that he mentioned dual displays, so all his computers had better use the same graphics driver. This is the one business case for upgrading to 7 - imaging is a lot easier in general, especially if you don't have homogeneous hardware.
Another poster mentioned using nlite with a "bunch of drivers" added in. That would probably work if you're willing to script the installation and configuration of the rest of the programs on your image. Or, even worse, do it all manually.
What you're looking for is ImageX. You can get it from the Windows AIK. (It says "Windows 7 AIK", but it will work on XP.)
Recipe for win:
Create a Windows PE flash drive. This pretty much gets you a bootable Vista/7 kernel.
Copy ImageX.exe from the WAIK onto the flash drive.
Boot your computer from the flash drive. Use imagex/capture/compress fast c: z:\file_on_external.wim "description in quotes" to create a.WIM image file.
You can take that WIM image and re-apply it to your computer at a later date. Windows activation and all of your programs will be preserved. You can also mount WIM files like directories using imagex/mount.
However, you will not be able to take an XP install and move it to a system with different hardware. XP's drivers and HAL will throw a fit if you move it to a computer that's too different, although similar-enough hardware will "mostly work."
You can download and run Sysprep from Microsoft before you capture an image. It strips out some of the hardware and user-specific settings and returns the computer to XP's "mini setup" mode, where it will ask you for username/password/CD key/whatever. But even then, XP images are still very hardware bound; more often than not an image won't work until booting from an XP CD and doing a repair install.
The complainant in the article actually e-mailed and called Amazon several times, and got several less-than-satisfactory responses. Evidently Amazon's solution is "mediation" - you're supposed to talk to the hackers and work something out! They have zero interest in actually shutting them down.
If one man can be acknowledged by the cyber-community to make a difference, (and, in passing, hats off to him), imagine what Government could do with a well-financed team of, say, ten people?
As you said, the BBC claims 200 million Japanese Winny users, relative to the island nation's entire population of 130 million.
It's also romanized "Winny," but again they couldn't be bothered to Google.
Sadly, Sankaku Complex (NSFW!) has better reporting than the BBC.
Evidently, the most "famous" victim so far was a teacher downloading child porn and warez on school computers. Even sadder than the BBC's reporting, he's so far kept his job.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm tempted to hope you're much older than my naught-and-twenty, because someone younger would hardly be justified in accusing me of having "a lot to learn in front of me." Then again, you have the same success with capitalization as 13-year-old texters.
Society and civilization are definitely "challenging" at best without government. But, I challenge the assertion that we should be angry only at corporations. They're just playing the game whose rules are decided by a corrupt government.
If only an incorruptible government can protect us, we're better off without any.
I understand the points you're making - but I think blame is placed perfectly as it is. "Corporations" (as if they're a single, monolithic entity) have been wildly successful within their intended purpose - make money.
Government, on the other hand, is characterized by failure, the largest of which is the one you mentioned - failure to regulate the Corporations.
Granting the legitimacy of both Corporation and Government, which should we be angry at? The Corporations at least were successful!
Linux on Windows on Mac actually came about through some fairly sane reasoning.
First, we needed a local server for imaging. "The" imaging server was in another building, and the bandwidth between the network stacks in each building isn't that impressive.
Second, we needed a faster computer than the bottom-of-the-barrel slimtower Pentium 4s that were deployed elsewhere. The art department on campus had a lab of those nice, dual quad-core Xeons. They were by far the fastest computers on campus, had 4 SATA bays and PCI express slots for eSATA riser cards, and dual gigabit ethernet. Good server hardware.
So, we just took one. I figured it's not really "stealing" since it belongs to the college either way.
After acquiring the Mac server, Windows Server 2008 R2 was a natural choice. Windows Deployment Services is just the best way to deploy Windows images, period. The college also had a dozen licenses they weren't using, so IT gave us one.
So, we have a Windows imaging server now. But, believe it or not, Windows Server 2008 R2 just sucks donkey balls for routing packets. As in, it more or less refuses to do it if it's also an Active Directory Domain Controller. Which it was, because Windows Deployment Services requires a Domain Controller, and the rest of the network is on Novell.
We also wanted a caching proxy anyways - we spent a lot of time patching Windows when we build new images, and we also repair student laptops. So, we threw an IPCop image on VirtualBox to use for routing, DNS, and update caching. (I am aware of WSUS, but it's overkill - we really don't care about manually approving every Windows hotfix when we're patching student laptops.)
Later, we wanted to set up a Wiki. Us student workers had pretty much set up the network in that building, and all of us graduate in a few weeks. So, we made another VM, installed CentOS, and set up a Wiki.
So, that's how you get Linux on Windows on Mac. And other than the fact that Window Server Backup simply does not support volumes larger than 2 TB, it's been an awesome setup.
If you add Solaris, you can then create a zone/container that is able run Linux binaries via ABI emulation.
That's ingenious - we could host our virtual machines inside the Linux version of VirtualBox, running on Solaris' ABI, which could in turn be virtualized on Server 2008 R2's HyperV running in Parallels on Mac OSX. Which, in turn, can now be run in VirtualBox.
I'm actually considering trying that, just to make the next generation of student workers cry. (I'm a graduating student worker; almost all of our current staff are graduating as well.)
You shudder, but I'll see you one better: Our primary server at work is some kind of Mac tower with two quad-core Xeon processors. It runs Windows Server 2008 R2 which in turn uses Virtual Box to host CentOS VMs for routing, DHCP/DNS, a LAMP stack, and a firewall.
Linux on Windows on Mac. We call it "Turducken."
Off-topic (that's your cue, moderator queue) but related to parent's sig:
I can't speak for computer engineering, but I'm a soon-to-be graduating computer science major. The curriculum was a lot of fun, but it's not software engineering - it's math. Until recently, it was just a concentration of our math major.
That means it's a lot of theory - data structures, algorithmic efficiency, set theory, relational algebra, Turing completeness, etc. It doesn't seem immediately applicable, but it's handy to know when (if! you could go into academia!) you start writing "real" code. Your solutions will be simpler and more elegant when you know the difference between a linked list and a stack.
Computer engineering sounds like hardware hacking. That's the opposite of proofs and pure thought-stuff. Good luck.
It is possible that I misunderstood what you meant by "re-image." I work for IT on campus, and we deploy it on our lab images. So, I can tell you that it doesn't reboot our computer labs at 2am, pull a 5 GB image off of fast ethernet, and restart.
It also doesn't keep a copy of the image in a hidden partition - we have images that take up more than half the size of the victim machine's hard drive; the technology that would make that possible would be more interesting than Deep Freeze itself.
A frozen computer works exactly as a normal computer does - you can save documents, delete Windows files, even format the disk. Except that your changes are magically gone upon rebooting, like the computer has "amnesia." Wikipedia says it works by redirecting writes to disk sectors, which makes sense. It might redirect writes to a "hidden" partition, because modifying a frozen partition offline causes weird behavior.
You carefully document the costs to buy a mac, but assume that an Android developer would already have some computer. That's not a fair comparison.
You have a point, but I think it is a fair comparison. Prospective iPhone developers are, well, developers. I don't know of a single developer that doesn't have any computer at all, but I know quite a few that don't have Macs. And, the "additional use" of an already-owned PC won't cost any extra until TPM adoption reaches critical mass.
If you already have a Macintosh, the cost to develop for iPhone over Android is the Apple developer fee. Otherwise, it's developer fee + Mac purchase.
Deep Freeze doesn't actually re-image the computer - if you save a file locally, it's gone when you reboot it. It probably keeps a buffer or something at the end of a frozen partition.
You can have it automatically reboot (thawed) to install Windows updates and run maintenance scripts.
People still- *hurk* *gaaaaaaaasp*
This is a lot better on Vista/7. Legacy programs at high DPI are bitmap enlarged to maintain correct proportions. (Although yes, this does make some programs look fuzzy.) Smarter programs that handle DPI properly can set a flag in their application manifest if they handle different DPI properly. .NET programs written using WPF are entirely vector based, and so scale to any resolution.
This was wonderful for my grandparents - they had been running XP at 640x480 because of their poor vision. When they got a Windows 7 computer, we ran the screen at its native resolution and just turned the DPI settings way down.
"Gun-toting" and "crazy" are orthogonal. While your coworkers are definitely both, you should be suspicious of anyone who wants to limit your capacity for self-defense.
If this game does sound like something you'd be interested in, join World 3 (the NA EST server). Whisper Zeal, Temple, or Danderfluff for an invite into the NakedAndPetrified alliance.
It depends on the model, but a lot of features need long-term storage. Things like "secure" printing, where you have to type in a PIN before it will release our document.
Other features like "print from the web interface" or "print from e-mail" (running on a server on the printer itself) need storage. Keeping a history can also make management easier - some people use it to keep track of who is using company printers for personal use.
I'm not surprised - there are all sorts of nifty things mere "copiers" do. They can store documents forever, especially "secure" ones that you have to release with a PIN. They provide network services - some include (hackable!) FTP servers.
HPs printers support SNMP, but usually in the most insecure method possible. One of the simpler things you can do (Google it, perhaps not using SNMP) is remotely change the LCD text and blink the status lights. I wrote a script that would make all the HP printers on campus flash an animated ASCII Kirby dance.
Print servers are just that - servers. But, they look like copiers, so they get thrown out with secrets.
It's neither new nor subtle; it's why expertsexchange now hyphenates their URL: experts-exchange.com.
Is this not the goal of code re-use? I mean, if there is no copyright violations, that's what ppl should do... Schools are always trying to make you implement retarded things anyway...
You re-use code to avoid "reinventing the wheel." The intent is to 1) save time developing what already exists, and 2) take advantage of all the debugging that was already done for you.
The goal of getting a CS degree is to understand what the fuck a wheel is. Copying from expert sex change is not going to make you a good computer scientist; it won't even make you a good software developer.
Cows are lazy, but also very curious.
I was bicycling past a herd of cattle, and they all looked up and stared at me. They started wandering towards the road I was at, following me, but soon broke from "mosey" into full-out "walk." I sped up, and so did the cows - they were leaping, like giant, bloated, mooing rabbits, fully keeping pace with my bicycle.
Granted, I never had cancer, but I'd like to think I bicycle faster than cows. They were almost doing 20 miles an hour.
They're evil, too. My grandfather was a farmer back in the day. One day working in the fields, a door-to-door salesman drove up, through the field, to try to hawk something to him. My grandfather was annoyed, naturally, but the cows discovered his car and licked all the chrome off.
I'd be inclined to agree with your "proper system imaging/installation via something like an installation server" approach. If he has sufficient dollars, kittens blood, and vespene gas, he wants to set up Windows Deployment Server (a feature in 2008 R2.) Windows 7 images are almost completely hardware agnostic - you can build them in a virtual machine and deploy them to real hardware if you want, as long as you stick the appropriate drivers on the server.
XP is a different story; it's so hardware bound it's not even funny. If you Sysprep an XP image, ghost/dd/imagex/whatever will probably let you move it to different hardware. Except that he mentioned dual displays, so all his computers had better use the same graphics driver. This is the one business case for upgrading to 7 - imaging is a lot easier in general, especially if you don't have homogeneous hardware.
Another poster mentioned using nlite with a "bunch of drivers" added in. That would probably work if you're willing to script the installation and configuration of the rest of the programs on your image. Or, even worse, do it all manually.
What you're looking for is ImageX. You can get it from the Windows AIK. (It says "Windows 7 AIK", but it will work on XP.)
Recipe for win:
You can take that WIM image and re-apply it to your computer at a later date. Windows activation and all of your programs will be preserved. You can also mount WIM files like directories using imagex /mount.
However, you will not be able to take an XP install and move it to a system with different hardware. XP's drivers and HAL will throw a fit if you move it to a computer that's too different, although similar-enough hardware will "mostly work."
You can download and run Sysprep from Microsoft before you capture an image. It strips out some of the hardware and user-specific settings and returns the computer to XP's "mini setup" mode, where it will ask you for username/password/CD key/whatever. But even then, XP images are still very hardware bound; more often than not an image won't work until booting from an XP CD and doing a repair install.
Here to bring the sample size to n=2.
I live in the American midwest, and I say "an 'istoric event." But I pronounce the "h" in "that's historic" or "historical."
Conclusion: I'm a freak.
The complainant in the article actually e-mailed and called Amazon several times, and got several less-than-satisfactory responses. Evidently Amazon's solution is "mediation" - you're supposed to talk to the hackers and work something out! They have zero interest in actually shutting them down.
If one man can be acknowledged by the cyber-community to make a difference, (and, in passing, hats off to him), imagine what Government could do with a well-financed team of, say, ten people?
Hahahaha! Oh, man. You're killing me.
As you said, the BBC claims 200 million Japanese Winny users, relative to the island nation's entire population of 130 million.
It's also romanized "Winny," but again they couldn't be bothered to Google.
Sadly, Sankaku Complex (NSFW!) has better reporting than the BBC.
Evidently, the most "famous" victim so far was a teacher downloading child porn and warez on school computers. Even sadder than the BBC's reporting, he's so far kept his job.
Strong, capable, confident female characters? Doctor Crusher, Captain Janeaway, Uhura, etc etc??
You forgot Wesley Crusher.