Jump to content

VaKo

Dedicated Members
  • Posts

    7,713
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    2

Everything posted by VaKo

  1. A Nexus One, but I'm looking at a Canon 5D MKII DSLR (mmmmm.... full frame goodness)/
  2. Dear god, that looks like an industrial design student ate some bad shrooms. As for cases, I like Antec ones, I have a 300 with a EVGA 285 GTX in it, but for you the 900 would probally work ok.
  3. It would be awesome, and this along with a newer version of IBP will be rolled out just as soon as your friendly admin staff get said software and free time to implement.
  4. But its not a considerable amount spent on licenses, most of the money goes on things like paying for staff to run stuff, paying for project management, hardware (i.e. massive SANs, server farms etc). Plus the ultimate benifit of Windows is that if push comes to shove, you can call MS at 0400 on a Saturday night and make them stay until its working again, no matter how long it takes. As for the school example you gave, that's not a great deal, unless they were going to do this 2 week course once, and never used the software for anything else. But again, it should be a single purchaser system for the entire public sector, so you could drive down costs by purchasing licenses in bulk for loads of schools at once.
  5. Its all about support, MS has a whole host of outsources like HP, Siemens, IBM, Dell et al who will sell you everything from the servers, desktops and laptops, to data centers and the staff to support everything (this is what I do for a living). The individual cost of Windows + Office on 1 machine doesn't really come into it. And if you look at the recent move to transition to a single purchaser model for the UK Gov, that's only going to be more apparent. There isn't anyone who really offers a joined up managed service for linux based infrastructure on that scale. As for smart phones and tablets, people aren't going to be doing serious work on them for a long time, even writing a long-ish email on a BB is a chore, let alone editing a word document.
  6. Only crusty old geeks like us have desktops these days, and that's because we want more power, more flexibility and tend to stick in one place when geeking out. The argument for a laptop is always "Do you want to use it in a place other than your study?", if the answer is yes, buy one.
  7. With you all the way on that. As for the SSD issue, unless you have an actual RAID card, not whatever fakeRAID your mobo comes with, it probally won't work well in the long run. Just setup a local policy to redirect your user profile or redirect things like your music, pictures, documents, downloads etc (keeping your temp dir on the ssd). Job done, and back on your bike you go.
  8. The VideoLAN project can do some pretty amazing things with streaming, worth checking out.
  9. OpenOffice is a POS (IMHO), Office 2010 is so far ahead its not even funny any more. All this is going to be is a CMS system that the government can use across departments instead of multiple systems being purchased by various departments.
  10. http://innovate.direct.gov.uk/blog/open-so...tware-licensing Looks like they are taking the sensible choice and developing new projects with OSS and open standards.
  11. I'm not really sure why you consider this a problem, then praise OSX/Linux which have just as many bells and whistles as W7.
  12. Ubuntu Server is pretty simple to setup, you just configure it as a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PERL/PHP) server during install. There is also FreeBSD, which is a bit more manual but I like it: http://www.mydigitallife.info/2006/04/09/i...d-php-5-part-1/ http://www.freebsdmadeeasy.com/
  13. TBH, with the same 80GB SSD I've just opted to install W7 on the SSD, big programs on a seperate drive and redirect my user directory folders to another drive. Much simper and easy to setup.
  14. So basically its this combination of parts that doesn't work together, but the parts all appear to work independently in other systems? Have you tried removing the case from the equation?
  15. http://www.engadget.com/topics/tabletpcs Not a huge deal on the market with those specs tbh, you might be better off with a netbook, especially if you want a fully functional OS and the ability to be productive on it. Most tablets are basically big phones atm, its an immature segment of the market and probally will be until Q4 2011 when the 2nd gen devices come out.
  16. Not much will change, we've gone from paper, typewriters, adding machines to computers and laptops, and people still have to come into the office to do work. Plus tablets are pretty much just consumption devices, not creation devices. You can check your email on one, but try doing something with a humongous complicated spreadsheet on an iPad. Not going to happen. Ahh, the myth of Java apps being easy to port. Most aren't, especially the hugely complicated government apps, which will talk to an Oracle DB or if your really unlucky, a custom one. Even getting these apps to work on a newer version of Windows and passing QA testing is expensive, moving them to another OS entirely is going to require many many contractor man-hours. Its not going to save money in the long run though, its going to be massively expensive at a time when we have no money. I agree that new projects should look into implementing open source software and open standards, but replacing what we have would not be a wise use of money. The licences are a small part of the cost, the bulk of the money is spent on running the systems and procuring new systems from private contractors who charge through the teeth for what they do. It would appear that your drive to move to using entirely FOSS is driven more by ideology rather than any concert ideas about cutting costs. You need to be more realistic, while its easy for you to move to Linux, its a lot harder for big organizations to move.
  17. The HP Slate isn't going to be out until 2011, and will probally feature WebOS rather than W7. As for hacking on it, a cheap netbook is going to be 10 times better for the task.
  18. Amazons MP3 store is quite good tbh, fast, good selection and DRM free (but I think you Amazon account details are tagged in the files). Its also cheap. Juno is also good, you can even buy WAVs. So for music, I think you can quite easily download legally, DRM free without breaking the bank, and this is why when it comes to music I think most arguments about pirating are kinda moot these days. There are artists who rely on unpoliced downloads for promotion, but not all of them do. Trent Reznor has some interesting comments on how to make a living from music in the 21st century. You still have to remember that making good music takes time, costs money and that the people who make it have to eat. As for movies and TV shows, I think piracy has replaced renting to a certain extent. We've all got a collection of pirated movies that we downloaded, watched once and have left clogging up a HDD with no intention to ever watch again. Which is a problem. What the movie industry needs to do is to come up with a cheap, easy way of doing online rentals. I remember my GF buying a copy of the Star Trek movie that came with a version you could watch on your PC, but the DRM was impossible to deal with, after 3 restarts, installing a ton of software and still having it sit there saying "connecting to rights management server...", I just usenetted the damn thing. It was a pain in the arse to use legally and the only way I could get it to work was to pirate it, despite having a legal copy in my hands. This needs to change. At the end of the day, piracy is something I vigorously defended when I was a penniless student. But once I had a income, buying things wasn't really an issue.
  19. Wikileaks wasn't a target, it was a anti-scene effort. And tbh, we all know that downloading something for free rather than paying for it is wrong, despite the ways we rationalize it. And if you keep doing it, the interesting things you like won't get made because no one buys them, and all we will be left with is the tacky mass-market shit "everyone likes".
  20. Dumping Microsoft and moving to open source on the scale the UK government operates at wouldn't be a small undertaking. It would cost billions, as you would need to replace not only the basic desktop platforms and productivity software, but the Byzantium arrangement of bespoke applications that successive initiatives have deployed. It would also need to be done while maintaining business as usual, without large chunks of downtime. Munich tried this, and its not gone well so far. Something like this on the scale of the UK goverment would be a major undertaking lasting over a decade. Then you get to things like supporting it, at the end of the day if you have a MS deployment and it FUBAR's on you, then you can get MS on the phone until its fixed. If your dealing with FOSS, how easy is it to get the developer on the phone to fix it? Unless your using something like Novel or Redhat (which are just as expensive licences wise), its not going to happen. Unless you employ your own dev teams and maintain a custom distro. Or you could do what the US army is doing and go OSX. At the end of the day, MS produce a good suite of applications and services, which are backed up with documentation, support and a large pool of certified administrators you can hire. Instead of focusing on something like the TCA you need to look at the total TCO, and the ROI you can get by optimizing existing systems. On a government scale, this needs to be done by reducing the amount of duplicated functions and effort, introducing open standards over propitiatory stuff and leverage things like OS-agnostic cloud computing services. Its not as simple as banging a copy of Ubuntu on the computers at HMRC and seeing what happens.
  21. Keep it, its a sweet gadget. Best coffee table computer money can buy.
  22. LOL, Americans moaning about immigration. Always makes me laugh, have you all forgotten about Manifest Destiny? The original Americans, and where you ancestors came from? Your entire nation is based upon immigration as its core tenant. It has nothing to do with communism, a word most Americans seem to have very little idea about.
  23. The USB switchblade/hacksaw idea was around before Hak5 did a segment on it, but Hak5 took the idea and made it popular, plus there was(is?) a very active development forum here. So an idea that went from "its possible, here is a long boring white paper on the topic" to "it takes 30 seconds, here is a tool you download an a youtube video on how to use it". There is no indication on how the hack was done, or even if it involved similar techniques to the ones with links to Hak5, but I remember a live QA session ages ago where Matt was defending the USB hacks as he was a sysadmin for the Navy (or something similar) and hadn't heard about it before the show demo'd it. USB sticks are a great hacking tool, and cheap to implement. All you would have to do would be leave one somewhere it would be found (or in Iraq/Afghanistan terms get captured with it on you, or hand it over to a foreign solider), and 99% of humanity will take it and plug it straight into a computer to see what's on it. If you couple that with a poorly maintained windows based system, heavily networked environment and idiots at the helm, its very easy to setup remote access, or upload sensitive files. I would encourage any young hacker with a devious mindset to try this, USB sticks are cheap, people are morons and you could recover some interesting data.
  24. Ok, from my experience of building and managing around 30 ESXi boxes (ESX is dead tech, stick with ESXi) a 2500/2600 isn't going to work. ESXi 4.x is x64 only, and you will need a 28x0 or higher to use it. Same with Hyper-V, but it also needs hardware VT (which frankly, ESXi needs as well). So with those servers, its ESXi 3.5 or bust. Use CPU-Z to check your CPU's, but I think your out of luck. Also, if you have less than 4GB of RAM, its not going to be worth it. As for backing up ESXi VM's, you should check out http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-9843.
  25. Interesting. The UK is getting kinda dull, I think I'll look into that.
×
×
  • Create New...