PhunkySchtuff - Slashdot User

Submission + - Why does the US cling to imperial measurements?

Submitted by

PhunkySchtuff

on Wednesday April 20, 2011 @06:33PM

PhunkySchtuff writes: "As one of only three countries on Earth that hasn't converted to a metric system of units and measurements, there is a huge amount of resistance within the US to change the status quo. Whilst the cost of switching would be huge, there is also a massive hidden cost in not switching when dealing with the rest of the world (except for Liberia & Burma, the only other two countries that don't use the metric system)

With one of the largest organisations in the US, the military, using metric units extensively, why does the general public in the US still cling to their customary system of units?"

Submission + - End of the Road for Apple's Xserve (automatica.com.au)

Submitted by

PhunkySchtuff

on Friday November 05, 2010 @06:07PM

PhunkySchtuff writes: "Apple announced recently that they are killing the Xserve.
In their Transition Guide, they mention the replacement options of the Mac Pro or the Mac mini with Snow Leopard Server as replacement options. Neither are anything like a direct replacement — the Mac Pro is considerably larger and uses more power (largely due to the more powerful graphics card as a standard configuration) and the Mac mini is a small and energy efficient workgroup server that can't handle anywhere near the same workload.

In the past few years, Apple have been making inroads into larger enterprise businesses, largely thanks to the success of the iPhone and the ever-growing range of software available (for instance, Autodesk have recently committed themselves to the Mac platform) and now there's no longer going to be a real enterprise server offering."

Submission + - Recommendations for Firewall/VPN Appliances

Submitted by

PhunkySchtuff

on Thursday March 18, 2010 @04:16PM

PhunkySchtuff writes: "I have been using SnapGear Firewall/VPN appliances from Secure Computing for many years now and have found them to be very good. They are linux based, are highly configurable yet have a straightforward and easy to use GUI and they play well with Linux and Macs.

As the link above points out, Secure Computing were purchased by McAfee a while back and as of July 2010, they will be discontinued. It's always very frustrating when something like this happens — small innovative company with a great product is purchased by a massive corporate, promises are made to continue their wonderful support and then most of their product lines end up End of Life'd while the one thing that the company was purchased for is rolled into another product line.

I'm putting it to the Slashdot crowd to recommend a suitable alternative and the requirements are: The product needs to be open, it needs to have good after-sales support. It needs to be easy to configure and this is very important as these units generally get configured once when they go in and then they often don't need to be touched for months or years and it's easy to forget the intricacies of a complex GUI. They need to have PPTP and IPSec VPN support for ad-hoc client connections as well as site to site connections, and once again this needs to be easy to configure."

Slashdot Top Deals