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RogueSpear

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    Buffalo, NY
  • Interests
    skydiving, coding, and for the moment, figuring out BSD

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  1. I have a couple dozen of them at work (a police department). We've been getting ToughBook's for about 10 years now. I've swapped out SO-DIMMs and hard disks that have gone bad. The other guy in my office is a little better than me with actual finger work and has swapped out touchpads, keyboards, and screens over and over again. They're great units and worth their weight in gold. If there seems to be any weakness with them, it seems to be the touhpads. Also, the Bluetooth modules that Panasonic uses are made by Toshiba In Linux this generally means you're going to need to use the omnibook module. In Arch this is no problem - just get it from AUR. In Ubuntu I found it to be a bit more involved.
  2. I'm a little late to the thread, but thought I'd offer up a little advice. Back when Windows 2000 was Microsoft's current day server I read Mark Minasi's excellent, if not huge, Master Windows Server 2000. Basically I put myself in a self-imposed solitary confinement for a week and read the entire 1,000+ page tome. I walked out of my cell knowing Windows 2000 inside out and up and down (or so I thought). Anyway, he has a really nice style that makes for an easy read so far as technical books go. And it looks like he's still pumping out new versions of the book: http://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Microsoft-...8/dp/0470532866 Also, if you have any questions about something, in my experience he will actually respond back to an email you send him.
  3. My personal rule of thumb for domain member workstations is to never use or allow local user accounts on those workstations.
  4. For better or worse, a huge amount of enterprises use RHEL or CentOS. I am personally just beginning to find out just how incredible FreeBSD is (and am kicking myself in the ass for wasting so many years on Windows). Time is limited, but you really do need to diversify. At least have a basic knowledge Linux/BSD which probably equates to CentOS and FreeBSD. As the years go on I'm finding it more and more difficult to keep up on everything. It's getting to be like medicine where you need to specialize, yet everyone expects you to know everything.
  5. I don't know what drives this applies to within Western Digital's line up, but I recently purchased their 1TB bus powered passport drive. It came partitioned in some kind of way that part of it appeared as a CD-ROM even within Linux. No amount of fdisk or parted would free the thing up either. Eventually by way of Google, I was able to find a step by step on WD's website (that I couldn't find without the assistance of Google) that detailed how to get rid of this abomination. Here's the best part of it. Windows or Mac is required. First I had to update the firmware on the drive, then I had to run some sort of utility to remove the software and partition. This isn't something you can do in a VM either since the drive disconnects and reconnects several times. I ended up having to use a Windows machine at work in order to do this. Whoever at Western Digital though that this was a great idea and thought it was an even better idea to require Windows needs to be summarily executed. Anyway, it's something to consider if you're looking at a WD drive.
  6. More important than anything else - all of the browsers, all of the web, and everyone else need to dump the epic abortion that is known as Flash (and that doesn't mean go to Silverlight either). Only Adobe could make Microsoft look like a security conscious software developer.
  7. I like Chrome, but until all of the functionality provided by Adblock Plus, BetterPrivacy, Cookie Monster, and NoScript is available in one form or another, I won't make the switch full time. I also really like Aurora quite a bit, but it has the same deal breaker as Chrome for me.
  8. For Windows I believe SpeedFan can both send email and shutdown based on temperature readings, fan RPMs, voltage readings, etc. from both the CPU and GPU (depending on the hardware support of your video card). For Linux I don't know of a real turnkey system but you could probably rig Conky to do all that with a little elbow grease.
  9. Sheesh.. no sooner than I finally find the proper article, they go out and post a brand new benchmark for 32 v 64: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=arti...2_pae&num=1 Looks like there's no reason to stick with 32-bit unless you simply can't live without a particular application that refuses to work under 64-bit.
  10. Woops... They did just have a 32 vs. 64 article in the last month or so that presented some pretty surprising results (to me at least). I didn't look at my search results closely enough. I have the site in Google Reader and sort of figured the search wouldn't result in a 4 year old article. Man did I just now have a hard time finding it too: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=arti...final&num=1 Ok it's not strictly a 32 vs. 64 article, they had OSX in there too. And it is older than I thought - November 18th. Anyway, I was surprised at some of the differences between the two archs. In my own testing, I've noticed some difference with Handbrake encoding. Not a ton, but I'll take whatever I can get.
  11. Sometimes the written word doesn't translate as well as a face to face discussion, so I'll say that I'm not trying to be a smart ass here when I ask what exactly makes it so much better? Granted, starting with version 2010 you no longer need to use IE to get the full OWA client, but I've found Exchange to be a very labor intense affair - especially when you're the one administering an entire network all by yourself. Their licensing model has always left little to be desired in my book and things are only worse now that Outlook licenses are not included with each seat. In addition a SAN is practically mandatory in all but the smallest of deployments. I found that you get a lot more functionality from Google by default, particularly when you factor in cost.
  12. You need to dedicate an entire server for Symantec's enterprise offerings these days. And even then they don't work right. I swear they took what wasn't a bad product and sent it right into the crapper. I've been very happy with the free version of Avira's AntiVir product, but have no experience with their enterprise stuff. If anybody here does, I'd be very interested in opinions, thoughts, etc.
  13. Here's a recent article benchmarking Ubuntu 32-bit vs. 64-bit http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=arti...m=616&num=1
  14. It's been a while since I've had an Ubuntu install but I think when you install VLC from synaptic that libdvdcss gets pull in with it - which should allow you to play your DVDs. Probably some of the newer titles with more screwy copy protections won't be playable though.
  15. Couldn't agree more. I went from a Penryn w/ 4GB to a Core i7 w/ 8GB for my desktop at work. Now I'm running two virtual servers and two virtual clients each with 1GB RAM all at the same time. I can't even explain how awesome it is to be able to have an entire simulated network available for testing. My old system was obviously two core. But the new system is quad core with hyperthreading, show it shows as 8 core. And of course you can never have enough RAM.
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