Posts by vmistery
53 posts • joined Friday 29th July 2011 13:38 GMT
Took me a minute to read this correctly... this is 3.10.* not 3.1.* I must be on a slow day... I was thinking it was strange that even Debian 7 is on 3.2.* now!
Be a few years before we get that I imagine
Re: Debian is for more than a gee-whiz! desktop
Exactly, We use Debian extensively on servers at work and have never even installed a GUI. Here in fm the UK we seem to be in the minority however looking at job adverts they are all for MS Server outfits.
Re: good
Couldn't agree more. Other than the essentials bundles they offer it is extremely pricey. We have been looking at Proxmox ('free' but support costs) as an alternative and it seems very reasonable as a fire and forget solution for some production machines and its easier to secure if you want it on the net. Still looking for a good alternative to VMwares discontinued LabManager though, VCloud Director is truly terrible to support.
Is this AMD slowly coming back to life with these, APUs and the Console maker deals?
Re: How much !
Ultrabook prices are coming down but until AMD get something worthwhile working at that TDP level with similar performance Intel can charge whatever they want and I am guessing the same applies here.
I was quite interested till I got to the price. I saw the Pi mentioned and though oh something for £50!
Its really refreshing to hear other people also appreciate working for an in-house team in a SME as much I do. My salary might not be as high as it could be elsewhere but its not terrible and I am quite happy with it, especially as I know if I am ill I wont be interrogated on return and Management don't require endless statistics to prove the necessity for a new Mouse. As with all things its swings and roundabouts and you have to decide what's best for you in the long run but for me at the moment as an IT youngling (only 6 years in the post grad IT Industry) its a great way to be able to get hands on with every aspect of IT from Debian to Windows from Cisco to Juniper which working in a large outsourced department would not let me do. Ok so I drifted off topic there but basically well done for smaller companies giving in house IT a chance. We certainly save ours money.
Re: NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!
I left Sky for plusnet because Sky would not offer me a static IP. I never found Sky to be that bad though to be honest though other than that
Plusnet offer a static IP for a small one off charge, I think its about £10. I have to have one for work and was in the same situation.
Re: So were they for the scrap heap or not?
I am more worried that it sounds like they are not properly disposing of hard drives. The rest should be sent for recycling as you say and not a scarp heap.
Re: @vmistery
if it exists!...
I wonder how the question was worded. For example, my Grandparents who are over 75 have a Laptop but no internet connection at home, however I know that when they visit us they do go online for brief sessions on Google to find out the latest butterfly facts or something similar. If these people are considered to have 'never been online' because their use is so occasional I expect the real 'never been online' figures are lower. People like this often ring relatives or friends to get them to Google things for them or go down the Library to get their Internet Fix.
I guess I just find it hard to find such a large number believable.
Re: "Windows Server is $750" - Word to the wise - a Linux server does the job better for $0
Poor advice? I don't see your point - does it matter what OS it is using in this case? its a nice little experiment! It also shows the very real ability to create very decent performance at a very reasonable price whether you would use it just in test or in Production or just do for a bit of fun. I like recycling our old kit into testing machines as it is rare they need anything more than new disks. I too would not personally use Windows for my shared storage but this chap obviously wanted too (probably because learning to do this in another OS would cost him more in the long run).
Slow speeds are not just limited to the more rural areas though. In a town of 25000 it took BT till last may to enable us for ADSL2+.
We were slightly more lucky though as 3 weeks later they enabled us for FTTC. From 2Mbps to 76Mbps in a month although we are in a 'Market 2 Area' so I guess had a bt more of a chance of getting it than People in a Market 1 Area..
Well I upgraded to Windows 8 as a test on my Desktop because its only £25 at the moment. I find the lack of a back button in the 'Modern UI' or whatever they call it now most annoying, this is probably because I am using a mouse not a touch screen. It also feels half done, the full control panel and all MS applets should have been migrated to the new interface rather than having half on the 'old' desktop and half on the new, its annoying and messy. The last thing I don't like is its close tie-in with Windows live, for one thing I dont like using the same password to login to my PC as I do for my email - but perhaps I am just paranoid. Will I go back? Well at the moment I dual boot but am trying hard to not use Win 7, as it takes my Win 7 installation an age to get going though this might be the motivation I need to stay with Windows 8 and keep 7 on for emergencies.
As for their celebrations? Have they realised its doing a Vista?
Posted in Adobe offers free trip to PowerPC era
Even if they just say its free for non-commercial use that would give them a real boost in say 5 years time when all the kids currently in education have learnt how to use it. A bit like Microsoft do for schools with MS 360 now.
Never could quite manage Farscape - Next time its on SyFY...I will try!
Loved DS9, its actually the only StarTrek TV series I can still watch without cringing constantly at how perfect the Federation are. I loved the other Treks too back in the day (except the Original *cue scathing attacks*) . Also much enjoyed B5, never really thought of them as that similar. Thought DS9 got better with age where B5 for me peaked and then was on life support for the last couple of series. Also love Blakes 7, the original Dr Whos, FireFly and more recently Battlestar and A Town called Eureka
Basically - Up the SciFi!!!
We need more of it.
Ok, so who can come up with the best new wikipedia page for "The Register" after this article
"The Register"
A so called 'online' magazine, known for supporting crime, drugs and probably has links to the Mafia. Also known for depriving organisations of financial assistance
Re: There's even a youtube video about it
Reminds me of an experience I had when when Woolworths was closing. A woman was yelling at this poor employee that the 70% off (or something huge anyway) christmas lights she had bought had a single broken bulb. For goodness sake these people are about to loose their jobs and you are worried about a bulb! Get a grip!
Re: Real Computer Economics
"I purchase a new Mac on average about once every 5 years"
That's a normal time frame for a PC too. Ironically my girlfriends 3 year old MacBook which cost more than twice my Laptop cant upgrade to the latest version of OS X and same with my 4 year old Mac Mini.
"Friends with PCs rarely go half that time"
Unless they are buying the bottom of the range kit they are probably wasting money then. I am using a 6 year old Pentium D based desktop right now with no issues
"Initial cost is more for a Mac but upkeep and depreciation is less."
Very true
I think you are right actually, Must have been a pretty early one.
In a small town in Norfolk we are actually in quite a good situation with Broadband surprisingly. Especially if you compare the 60Mb/s I get to the 3Mb/s that my friends in Vienna, Austria get. So perhaps we are not the worst off.
What about 'mamma' - the mother of all search engines :-D That was the default one we used at school on Netscape Navigator.
Ah lies and statistics. Its all about interpretation. Its a shame they did not also include "donation as a % of income", not that they would have that info but anyway I would expect it to tell a different story.
I wonder how I would be classed in the survey, a Windows PC, an iPhone , a Macbook and multiple Debian servers...
Posted in The best smartphones for Christmas
Re: poor iPhone 5 = 90%?
Once you include the brand image factor it accounts for that. I expect without the Apple name it would get 80% or so.
Question is can Apple light the world on fire with the next one? TBH I think its only real weakness is ios
But the question I want to know the answer too - Are these the droids I am looking for? And what would a Death Start make Obama?
Re: Err...
Not at all, I enjoy hearing about the latest versions of Windows Server especially as I use it (as well as Debian and CentOS). What I don't appreciate is being advertised to by a reseller which IMO adds nothing to a balanced technical discussion which the reg should be.
BTW Windows Server may have the largest install base per version / Distro but not if you compare it to Linux as a whole. I would expect to see roughly 50/50 windows / Linux installations and therefore articles. The % of Linux installs is also much much greater in the rest Europe.
This sounds very much like an advert for Server 2012. MS will be happy. Why not have some days promoting the latest Debian / FreeBSD release?
Now how about a SME Budget array? I dont want to be using 15K SAS drives forever ya know!
Re: Employment Fair
Yup, unless you want a 13 hour a week cleaning job they are pointless. All the companies at these events know you are desperate and if you have already been made redundant then waiting till the new year is just not an option.
Re: What does "support" mean though?
I bet android handsets are supported even less though. A 3 year contract is insane, most here in the uk are 2 years and I think that's too long. 18 months for me is ideal.
I have to agree that the so called 'expert' on this show introduced a fault which would never happen. In over 10 years of repairing mine and friends PCs and when I worked for myself customers PCs I can safely say I have never had a jumper issue that wasn't self-inflicted when putting a dual drive system back together. I see a lot of people on here saying they only charge £60 for labour for a HDD replacement? This is exactly why I moved out of the industry, you are undervalued and no one charges enough, a plumber on the other hand!
But companies like this make me angry, they give IT a bad name, that and those IT directors who know absolutely nothing about IT and award stupidly massive contracts for something they dont even need. But take some heart the problem is endemic across most industries, finance, plumbers, electricians. builders, sales people, garages, utilities etc etc and its not just the little companies either. Whats needed is a fundamental culture change.
Re: Rural not such a bad option
Thats why I am suggesting they are a bit more innovative. If you can make £15 / month and have to supply a phone to people in a city (lower margin) or £30 / month for a landline replacement and have to supply nothing but a cheap router with a 3g card in to someone in the country the margin per sale is vastly higher and the numbers start to look better.
Also as EE wont have ANY competition for at least 18 months and they would have a potential speed advantage over BT the uptake % should be higher in the Villages if they did their marketing right. I am not suggesting they put them up for places that only have a few houses but larger Villages absolutely. If you could grab 25% of 300 homes (using my parents village here) thats 75 households. Per month thats £2250 or £27000 a year. Now assuming that you then offer people in that village mobiles that are going to have great signal and great speed you also make that money too.
Rural not such a bad option
For those saying that it wouldn't be worth putting out in the Countryside I disagree. If you put this out in the Countryside and market it as a fixed line replacement (offering Virtual local numbers perhaps) product then you could potentially extract £30 / month or more out of each customer plus their Mobile contract. Sounds pretty sweet to me, especially if you are the only Operator doing it. At the end of the day me on my FTTC line in a well connected Town is unlikely to move my fixed line. I also will probably not bother with 4G until the cost comes down as we have many wireless hotspots and good wifi at home. EE if your reading by the way I am available to discuss :-D
I have absolutely no doubt though that next month or whenever the iPhone 5 is released these sales figures will be very much different. I am actually holding off upgrading My S2 until its released so I can decide if it is actually worth spending the extra on the iPhone. TBH I am also interested to see what MS brings.too!
For me its quite simple, if you actually invent something say a new fuel or design a whole new OS from the ground up or whatever then sure Patent it, you deserve it! Whats not acceptable is for a company to patent something that really isn't an invention for of a modification to an existing design.
Re: Fixing the patent system
Err No. The difference being that they are not patenting the design of 4 wheels and a chassis they are patenting an entire design. Apple are simplistically speaking saying that a rectangle with rounded corners is worthy of a patent. A car can be far more different.
Well this is a very interesting outcome. Thing is my contract is up with O2 and i was about to sign up to another 12 month deal. But now I know that EE has at least an 18month head start I might go with them (4G phone availability dependent). I can see however that this is not fair on the operators that do not have this flexibility tbh I think they should be forced to share their network with their rivals until the auction has been concluded and rival networks setup or the auction should be brought forward to say tomorrow. Some of the spectrum must surely be free already.
Oh Windows 8. I will be hit with a terrible choice. Pay for a more expensive upgrade to windows 7 (from *cough* Vista) or to Windows 8 which looks kinda like a V-tec toy but will be cheaper. Windows 7 the new XP?
Posted in Judge: Oracle must remain on Itanic
Quite impressive really that a seemingly only verbal contract can be worth so much, I guess HP's next battle will be INtel and forcing them to keep developing the processors!
Couldn't agree with you more. And as much of the stuff I use is going web based such as my work email (accessed via roundcube), our case management system, our in house developed browser based software and google docs there wont be much need for me to use it at work either soon. All I 'need' most of the time is a good SSH client and a browser and probably Java for those odd Minecraft moments!
Perhaps Ubisoft could just use steam? Its effective, most of the people I know use it and it protects their game but no Ubisoft seem hellbent on penalizing their paying customers rather than the pirates.
What the game industry needs to do is agree on a common DRM system which is created for the benefit of both customers and companis. Perhaps then they could spend dev time on 'small' things such as customer security and being able to play an offline game whilst on an unstable broadband connection...
Re: Err?
Not at all snobish. The windows management GUIs are simply much better than webmin.
The problem I have with GUIs in general is just you dont learn as much about how things work. You need this knowledge for when something breaks and you need to manually edit a zone file or change some permissions somewhere and look at log files,once you have this knowledge then using a script to make the task quicker is a good option or indeed - a gui. Obviously when viewing data or typing a letter you are not going to use the CLI but for most server administration functions there is rarely a need. If nothing else Webmin opens up another area of potential attack and is largely unnecessary IMO.
Re: "For pain reduction, I recommend Webmin for experienced admins and first timers alike."
I agree about SELinux, if the devs actually had a suggested config for their apps added as part of the package install process it would be a breeze.
Not sure I agree about using Webmin! In fact a new Linux user should not deviate from the prepackaged stuff in the default repos IMO. It also does not help you learn what is really going on if all you do is use a nice pretty GUI - if you want to do that you may as well use Windows if you can afford it, its hard to move away from a GUIbut is well worth it.
I think its a shame that SELinux is not enabled by default on Debian though and that the default firewall is set to to allow everything! Dont forget to close down you ipv6 too! Time to switch?!
Posted in GM to slash vast outsourced IT empire
Re: I disagree
Thats practically what I said, its ok in specific scenarios. Once you reach a certain size however it normally makes no sense at all because you are less likely to require a static system (more users = more chances even if the chances are small).
Outsourcing in other areas falls flat on its face too (experiences from both private an public sectors below):
Cleaning -> we had an increase in theft after outsourcing as it was a variety of people coming in and out so it was hard to prove who it was
General Maintenance -> Suddenly having to get 3 quotes to get a lightswitch changed, more expensive for the common jobs
IT -> Slower support response times, more poorly trained staff -> worse user experience -> expensive change requests -> less flexibility
Care Assistants -> Due to employee terms being reduced (£7/hour, no sick pay, no pension) high turnover of staff leading to much worse care quality for people who required care
I really could real them off. I am not saying it can't work but it often doesn't make sense once you reach a particular size. This is the same regardless of the size of company. For example where I work we Outsource the management of our PABX - this makes sense because we only have 100 phones to manage and we couldnt justify keeping all the spares and experience in house.
Posted in GM to slash vast outsourced IT empire
Outsourcing IT may look pretty sweet but really never works. I worked in the NHS for a while and if you wanted a desktop fixed, ring company1, if something else went down ring company2 who would then share a contract with company3 and blame it on them. Circles and a load of downtime which you would not have had on an in-house system and a load of users thinking you are an idiot because all it needed was a restart. Want a spelling changed in an app? That will cost you £30k. Thats the efficiency of outsourcing.
The only times I could think you would want to Outsource is if you simply cant get the technical abilities in house or for something incredibly static which won't change like email.
Don't believe them! Its the Triffids! Or possibly I have been watching too much TV?You decide!
