Posts by Tim99 2129 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Apr 2008
@david 12
Depends on where you live. The drought (Spelling, unless you meant a cold draft/beer) is very real in Western Australia, and the Perth dams have not been full for a long time.
The other side of the issue, the increase in flooding, has a higher probability in some areas corresponding to measured increases in ocean temperature. Eastern Australia is particularly influenced by the El Niño and La Niña Pacific Ocean climate patterns -They cycle every 5 years or so - Dorothea Mackellar's poem "My Country", first published over 100 years ago, describes Australia's extremes.
"I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.
....
Her beauty and her terror -
The wide brown land for me!
.....
Core of my heart, my country!
Her pitiless blue sky,
When sick at heart, around us,
We see the cattle die -
But then the grey clouds gather,
And we can bless again
The drumming of an army,
The steady, soaking rain.
......"
Since then, we know that the average temperature over the Continent has gone up by ~1C; and the ocean temperatures are even warmer...
@mathew42
I have lived in Western Australia for 20+ years. The rainfall has diminished dramatically in the SW. The area concerned is ~4 X the size of England. Our government has put 2 desalination plants on-line, and is discussing building more. The dams are hardly ever at more than 35% capacity - Some of this may be due to our population doubling (to 2+ million), but it is mostly caused by a decrease in rainfall, an increase in evaporation, and a reduction in run-off into water capture areas.
This weeks edition of the ABC TV program "Catalyst" was devoted to the impact of warming across nearly all of the Continent - WA was particularly mentioned as having more than 1C warming in the last century, with a dramatic warming of the coastal oceans.
Link (available until November 29): http://www.abc.net.au/iview/#/view/28262
Beer, because that might be all of us sandgropers have to drink.
@Frederic Bloggs
The worst of the Australian East Coast flooding is further away from the South West of Western Australia than London is from Moscow.
A CSIRO article on Australasian Ocean Currents, and how they help shape the climate around Australia can be found here: http://www.csiro.au/en/Outcomes/Climate/Understanding/AustralasianOceanCurrents.aspx
Many large organizations, have effectively already done this.
In an effort to keep the nasties out, most Windows desktops are so locked down so much that the user might just as well be using Chrome - No possibility of loading anything unauthorised, but still they are not really secure.
I don't remember much of a problem with VAX/UNIX and VT220/VT241s...
I am so pleased that I have retired, and do not have to get involved in this anymore.
I went from PDPs and Novas, *NIX, and through DOS, Windows 286 - 7 to retirement. As a rough rule, it seems that every other version of Windows has been something to avoid - Windows 3.1, and the original 95 and 98, NT 3.1, the original XP and Vista come to mind as "unfortunate". Windows 3.11, SPs of 95, 98SE, NT 3.5/4.0, and later versions of 2000 and XP were pretty fair; and 7 seems to be reasonable.
After some Pro Bono evaluation of Windows 8 for a couple of organizations, my recommendation is: If you are going to stay with Windows, wait until the second or third iteration of Windows 8 - Or hope that any rushed-out Windows 9 version has more input from the GUI team. Pretty much anything that you have that runs on the traditional desktop will be sub-par. I suspect that Windows 8 will be very successful in driving the change to apps and HTML5 on tablets (but unfortunately for Microsoft, not necessarily Windows tablets).
Much of the *NIX that I had learned 30 years before still works, even on Terminal on the shiny Apple OS X stuff. Fiddling around keeping Windows working was great when I was getting paid principal consultant rates, but I REALLY do not want to do it now in retirement just for myself and my wife. So we got rid of all of the Windows stuff, except for a couple of (hardly used) virtual machines on our other kit.
@dotslash - "good luck getting all that content back when Apple inevitably tank..."
Considering what your username is, you appear to be a shill or a bit of an idiot.
OS X conforms to the Open Group UNIX 2003 Specification, so I would probably mount another volume, then cp or rsync the files I needed onto it.
IMHO FRAND abuse is when "intellectual property" is incorporated into an "essential" international Standard.
If it relies on a patent, it should not be a Standard - Or, if it is accepted by the standards body, the licence must be Free (it is the Reasonable and non-discriminatory) part that causes problems.
I have spent a working lifetime around this stuff, and have reluctantly come to a conclusion about 'dumbing down'. I suspect that Microsoft, Apple, Google and Canonical have research data that suggests that many of their potential new users are incapable of using their traditional products - It is all too hard for them. We are, perhaps, insulated from this because we tend to like this stuff, and are prepared to put in the effort to use it.
It is also in the interests of these companies to attempt to roll back the whole free Internet thing - It is much better for them if they can lock a user-base into a propriatory locked-down network - A modern version of AOL, or the MicroSoft Network. There may be a trillion dollars riding on the choices that new users make, we are on the edge of a technological and societal change as big as those that came from movable type and broadcast radio.
My wife qualified as a Registered Nurse in 1969, and rose through the ranks of Staff Nurse and Sister in the NHS, and eventually, as a Matron in local government aged care. She makes the point that in the bad old days when she started, juniors (aged 16) sterilized bandages, made beds, cleaned dentures, and were directly supervised by qualified staff in day to day patient care activities. The nursing course was heavily practical and you were surrounded by patients.
I understand that since those days, one becomes a nurse by taking a degree. Apparently one does not have to have much to do with sick people until near the end of the course. Some people who take the courses may be far too important to get their hands dirty, and consider that management is where they rightfully belong.
@sabroni
A number of Buddhists would argue that Buddhism is not a religion:-
(It is neither a religion in the sense in which that word is commonly understood, for it is not "a system of faith and worship owing any allegiance to a supernatural being." - www.buddhanet.net )
I have been on the planet longer than you, and am, possibly, more cynical even than you. You wrote:-
"These "scientists" aren't any smarter than me, just have different disciplines"
Many scientists are aware of the motto of The Royal Society: "Nullius in verba " (Latin for "Take nobody's word for it"). The Royal Society chose this as its motto as this signified that they would establish facts via experiments and only disseminate objective science ignoring the influence of politics or religion.
One thing that us science types (who are trained to try and be always questioning) are made aware of is the Dunning-Kruger effect -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect
(The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than average. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their mistakes....
Actual competence may weaken self-confidence, as competent individuals may falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding. As Kruger and Dunning conclude, "the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others")
@AC Thursday 30th August 2012 09:47 GMT
I thought I was going to stay out of these comments, until I read yours...
******************************************************************************
"No front to back air cooling" - True, but it only runs at 12W idle and 85W max (41BTU/h 290BTU/h) with 2 two 500GB/7200 RPM HDDs.
"No proper rack mounting" - Several manufacturers make rack kits. You can even have them built into 1U racks with cooling etc. http://www.sonnettech.com/product/xmacminiserver.html
"External 'brick' power supply (IIRC)" - False, the Mac mini has had an internal power supply for the last 2 years.
"Single power supply" - True, although how many power supplies have you had fail in the last few years?
"No lights out management" - True, but there are 3rd party fixes (I have no personal experience here).
"Consumer grade disk" - True, but of a reasonable quality - I have had many "enterprise" grade disks fail too.
"Only a single disk" - False, Dual 500GB/750GB (7200-rpm) hard drives, and SSDs if you want.
"No expandabillity" - So? How about Thunderbolt?
"Only a single Ethernet port (don't suggest adding a USB Ethernet port) meaning no nic teaming, iSCSI, dedicated backup LAN or heartbeat network for clustering." - Instead of USB Ethernet I would suggest a Thunderbolt to Thunderbolt connector - Or even a Thunderbolt to Gigabit Ethernet Adapter @$29:00.
"No Fibrechannel" - If you need fibre channel to link to a SAN you could use the Promise SANLink Fibre Channel adapter. Or for a faster connection than standard Fibre Channel, you could use their 12TB 6 disk RAID with 2 x 10Gb/s channels to give you >800MB/s.
******************************************************************************
From "The Apple Xserve Transition Guide, November 2010" http://www.apple.com/xserve/pdf/L422277A_Xserve_Guide.pdf
"Perfect for small business and workgroups of up to 50 people, a single Mac mini can run the full suite of services that Mac OS X Server has to offer. For a larger number of users in a business or education environment, a single Mac mini can provide a single service. " It suggests that a Mac Mini should support up to:
File sharing - 100 concurrent uses
Mail - 100 concurrent users
Web - 800 concurrent users
Calendar - 800 concurrent users
Directory Services - Up to 10,000 user records in database, Up to 10,000 authorizations/minute.
These figures were based on the old Mac Mini with 2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB of 1066MHz DDR3,Two 500GB 7200 HDDs - The new ones have a 2.0GHz quad-core Intel Core i7, and can be specified with 8GB 1333MHz DDR3 SDRAM. Apple claim that the new ones are significantly faster (Java Server SPECjbb2005 - 3.2x faster;
AFP Server AFPBench - 2.8x faster).
I have many years of scars from this stuff including running, managing and writing software for VMS, PDPs, DG-Nova/Eclipse, SPARC/Solaris, HP-UX, DOS, Novell, Windows NT from 3.1 & Windows Server /applications (and SBS), Linux and OS X. I have some enterprise experience, having been directly responsible for all of the IT needs of a group of 450 scientists and engineers; and was also charged with technical/scientific input to another 50,000+ seats in that business. I have also written shrink-wrap software; and managed, sold and configured systems to many small businesses. What is your real hands-on experience, or are your comments based on bias?
My take is that several Mac minis would be OK for up to, say, a hundred users - Although I would recommend that you have a couple of spares. Bigger than a few hundred users could be a problem...
When all of the fAndroid kiddies and iFondle hipsters have moved over to HTML5, I shall still be using the CLI to talk to my compiled C programs - The way computing was meant to be.
Qt is OK, I suppose - If you have lusers who won't use the CLI, and you can't manage to write what they need with ncurses.
"Uniformed commissioned officers of the armed services generally consider the civil servants' idea of their equivalent military rank to be comically inflated - even quite minor bureaucrats, if their military rank equivalent were true, would be at a level where they might command major combat units. That said, the value of the military officers' own titles has been continually cheapened for a long time by reorganisations like this one."
Lewis - A two edged sword this one. As someone who was a Scientific Civil Servant in MOD many years ago, the administrative civil service and the pongos were both highly rank conscious - Rodneys a little less so. Fly-boys (except penguins), scientists, and engineers really did not care.
In those days the equivalents were: Scientific Officer (SO) == Lieutenant; Higher SO == Captain (army); Senior SO == Major; Principal SO == Lieutenant Colonel; Senior Principal SO == Colonel; Deputy Chief SO A/B = Brigadier/Major General; Chief SO == General.
The grade structures were quite rigid, except that the military type had seniority when at a military establishment; and the civil servant had seniority at a civilian establishment. Rumour had it that the relative seniority of two equal officers switched in the car between the two different types of establishment.
I myself, reached the dizzying heights of being equivalent to a colonel; but I only had 10 staff. It was said that civil service engineers and scientists had to be given relatively high grades compared to clerical types to keep them happy and reasonably well paid, so that they did not leave for the private sector...
You were unlucky. Apple batteries are expected to last 300+ cycles. They replaced mine from a MacBook Pro that had <100 cycles (it was well outside the Applecare Warranty) with a new one. Early MacBook Pro batteries can have a short life if you leave them on charge all of the time (they also run hot) - Apparently you are meant to let them discharge regularly. The same MacBook Pro also failed with a black screen when it was nearly 5 years old, due to a bad NVIDEA chip - Apple replaced the logic board free of charge. Similarly my 6 year old iPod Nano was replaced for free with the current version because of potential safety problems with the battery.
So all up, no cause for complaint here.
Nice anecdote Angus. My experience differs.
I used to listen to a lot of live music, from Gregorian chants in small churches to the Who in large halls.
In 1975 my wife bought me an LP12, complete with an SME arm and a Shure V15, which we played through a cheapish amp and speakers. I then spent the next 20 years saving up to buy stuff to match the LP12 - Fortunately my wife reigned in any golden ear traits that I might have had. The final system had Naim amplification, and a Linn Ittok/Asak and speakers. After a "Hi-Fi" demonstration that sounded impressive, I bought a medium price CD player. When I got it home and listened to it, we were appalled at how bad everything sounded, Yes the odd crackle and pop from vinyl had gone, but so had most of what made the music enjoyable. I took the CD player back. Eventually I bought a Naim CD player which we thought sounded Pretty good.
Now comes the vaguely interesting bit, I had a serious car accident which resulted in minor brain damage. Afterwards the LP12 still sounded reasonable, but the CD was uncomfortable to listen to. Unfortunately, although the LP12 was still good to listen to, I no longer had the mechanical skill to drive it without damaging records. I sold the entire system to a nice junior doctor for a fair price and bought a simple B&O all-in-one that sounded OK, not much musical enjoyment but OK for social and background listening.
So it would seem that the brain is at least as responsible for what we hear and enjoy as the equipment that we use...
Shouty Shouty, because that is what most Hi-Fi now sounds like to me.
@AC - 05:54
Excellent post. I used to supply and configure SBS to 50 user or less organizations - We wrote and supplied custom software that could use MS SQL Server, and found that it was cheaper and less hassle than supplying Windows and SQL Server separately. Exchange was a 'free bonus'.
I am retired now, and fortunately don't have to worry about getting paid for this stuff anymore.
I do however, recommend the OSX Lion Server for businesses that have a few users and who can't find a reliable Linux consultant; and don't want to setup a Linux based network themselves. It is a no-brainer if the owner/directors have an iFondlePhone or Pad as it is very easy for them to set up shared mail and calendars for out-of-office use. As for the vast array of PC software, most of them only want MS Word and Excel, and the Mac versions are pretty good.
An easy to use and set-up server with all of the features that many small/micro businesses need for about a thousand quid, with no need to buy CALs with an easy upgrade path to 50+ users could be a good deal.
Some of the bigger VARs denigrate SBS as there is little scope to gouge the SMB punter with multiple servers and CALS - As a result, I have seen several installations where the punter has more than 3 MS servers for less than 20 workstations courtesy of their friendly neighbourhood VAR - The reliability has generally been poor in spite of the punter paying thousands a year in support. I wonder if MS have effectively killed the small business sector to placate the larger players. This would certainly give an opportunity to someone who can supply the needs of the vast numbers of <50 user businesses.
@Philip Clarke
I think you misunderstand "standby" Apple has the numbers for a newer iMac here:
http://www.apple.com/environment/reports/
Standby is < 0.5W; Sleep is < 1.5W; Idle is 85W with the display on, or 35W with the display off.
Maximum continuous power use is ~205W.
If you want to save power, use the Apple menu put the iMac into Sleep mode when it is not actually working - Or you can use the shortcut keys for Sleep - [Control]+[Eject] followed by the [S] key.
I'm not sure about this version, but previously Bento used the SQLite database. SQLite is very capable at the hundreds of thousands of rows level, and supports most SQL commands, foreign keys, triggers, transactions, etc.
In the past I have been able to use Bento to cobble together a couple of simple solutions, and then have used a text editor on the Bento file to edit the created DDL to polish table structures. FiileMaker have gone out of their way to cripple Bento to protect sales of their FileMaker Pro product, so it is possible that they may have closed that back-door.
I'd love to know what your company does - 2000 odd Windows desktops with 750 odd Windows servers - That's less than 3 workstations for each server.
Back in the day, when I used to do this stuff, our rough rule of thumb was 1 Windows server for 10-30 Windows clients; or 1 *NIX box for 50-200 users; or 2 mainframes to hold it all together for about 50,000 users.
Uphill, in the snow both ways...
"when they erupt volcanoes erupt they emit vastly greater amounts of CO2 in a single day than mankind has in his accumulated history by a factor of about 100"
No. This is WRONG. For some real numbers read: http://hvo.wr.usgs.gov/volcanowatch/archive/2007/07_02_15.html
Over treasonable time periods human activity produces >two orders of magnitude more CO2 than volcanoes.
Or: http://www.skepticalscience.com/volcanoes-and-global-warming-basic.htm
(If you want pretty graphs. click on 'What the science says... Select a level... Intermediate'
"The Mount Pinatubo eruption emitted 42 million tonnes of CO2 (Gerlach et al 1996). Compare this to human emissions in 1991: 23 billion tonnes of CO2 (CDIAC). The strongest eruption over the last half-century amounted to 0.2% of human CO2 emissions in that year. "
Er, no. As someone who was a professional scientist in the 1970s I can remember no such thing. The basic science of the greenhouse effect was accepted at least 70 years before that. Infrared spectrophotometers capable of accurately measuring C=0 and C-H bond stretch (a primary mechanism for the greenhouse effect) were becoming inexpensive and common in the 1960s which, perhaps, allowed for the expansion of interest in this field.
I do recall 1976 as the hottest summer for over 300 years :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1976_United_Kingdom_heat_wave
Followed by a cold winter in 1978, thought to be caused by the two preceding hot summers.
(in a former live a chemist) - Yes me too.
I should have mentioned that it might be worth running with the gas ballast valve open for a few minutes - This will help get rid of any solvent (from glue, siloxane resin, gaskets, etc.) or water that may be entrained in the system/oil.
Maybe the State of Victoria is not very good at it? The State of Western Australia produces about one third of the output of Wonthaggi at about one tenth of the capital cost:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perth_Seawater_Desalination_Plant
The Binningup plant at Bunbury has already been commissioned, and is expected to be near full capacity later this year:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binningup_Desalination_Plant
Interestingly the water is usualy of better quality than that from the local groundwater and reservoirs.
@Wensleydale Cheese
"You lose the database side of things and some accessibility features, but the rest runs fine."
Before I retired I was a database developer, so the database bit was what I was hoping to use in LibreOffice (without loading Java). These days I use SQLite from the command line or the FireFox SQLite Manager Add-on. There has been talk of LibreOffice using a native SQLite driver without Java dependencies, but I am not sure what stage that is at.
As you say, LibreOffice seem to be depreciating Java - In view of the potential uncertainty that the Oracle purchase has brought, this may be a good thing anyway.
Unless you work for a company that has less than ten users "Why don't you have loaner computers?"
After many years experience in a business environment I note that, on balance, MacBook Pros are somewhat less likely to fail than professional level Dell machines - It is also likely that the Apple kit has the same components across machines, so duplication of the user's environment onto the loaner is easy - YMMV.
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