The educated technicians that try to implement this will find their networks shut down in other ways. The average Joe won't use such a network because it's not the default and they don't understand the technology or its implementation. The moment they have trouble with anything it's a reset to vendor-specific settings. The traffic will be shaped because it can be shaped at whim by the ISP; there is no Net Neutrality. So how does this idea succeed?
Idealism is great until it meets reality. That's not saying reality can't be changed BTW, but until it is you have to work within the known parameters or you're accomplishing nothing.
My bigger question is, why can't this sort of content just be delivered in Safari? The answer may be in the in-App charging and DRM, but if so that's a bit of a lame reason. Web sites for major magazines should look this good, on a standard browser.
I hear you, and my guess is all the variables in browsers and formats require resource-consuming (time is money) hacks. It's a pity the standards aren't "standard".
To The Daily's viewpoint, they have a slick-looking app that appears the same on every reader. Support costs are greatly reduced (compared to trying to support all those browsers and platforms) and there's no need to create another digital distribution network. There is no "Slashdot effect" to worry them, that's Apple's problem.
Yep. And $1 a week? That's what, half a Starbucks coffee? It's a no-brainer for the consumer IF the content is decent.
Right now I get my news from a bunch of different electronic sources -- no one source does it all and you have to check multiple sources to get different viewpoints. I check it throughout the day. I won't pay to have a newspaper delivered mostly because I don't like the idea of physical paper, and a lot of it isn't interesting to me. If this could replace several sites then count me in.
By shining a light into a cave you may see enough to avoid danger. You may also awaken a den of bears who attack and eat you. Don't blame the light for the result -- the light is neither good nor evil -- but instead use it to attain knowledge and then use that knowledge for good. Sometimes a frank discussion leads to greater understanding and sometimes it leads to a fight. One hopes we are capable at some point of having that grown-up discussion.
Knowledge almost always leads to problems -- whether that be disillusionment or conflict, whether the incremental achievements cause harm in some way or prevent suffering -- but the pursuit of understanding and aggregating information is what defines us as humans. You can use the knowledge for good or bad purposes. One would hope at some point our human race would progress beyond today's turmoil, but it's going to take time.
Yeah, the datasheet on the Duo looked great. And it does some of it well. I had a $500 budget and got a blank Duo and 2 2TB drives separately with money to spare. Things I liked included the noise level (it's extremely quiet especially with the 5900 rpm drives I bought). Time Machine support (which works great unless it's doing anything else). SSH access to the device is important to me; that works fine. Email sent whenever status changes or a problem occurs (it's configurable).
Things that sort-of-work: Firmware upgrades sometimes have to be applied multiple times for them to "stick" (and you get an email each time telling you it's been upgraded even when it doesn't "stick"). Since it's using a cheap RISC chip; you're better off treating this as a dumb RAID array than using it to stream or process anything. When I rsync files onto it (I do this for various files not backed up by Time Machine), I found it's much faster to mount it as a drive on my Mac and use the Mac to control the rsync (rather than use the rsync app running on the Duo via SSH).
Things that absolutely don't work include streaming to a non-jailbroken Wii. Printer sharing supposedly works (I have a single "real" computer on my home network) but using the shared printer with iDevices definitely does not. Anything that uses a lot of processor power, such as trying to copy a large file to it while streaming audio, or copying 2 sets of files. Overlapping I/O in other words breaks it. The ability to stream video / audio / pics to my iPad, iPod Touch 2G and iPhone 3GS, sort-of-works only if you have a small library... have tried several apps for that. It's slow as molasses, to the point you can't really use it.
There are features I haven't tested but are very important to me, such as the ability to pull the 2 drives and place them in a higher-end ReadyNAS (with more drive bays) as my needs grow without having to lose everything. The ability to pull a single drive, replace with a larger drive, have it automatically resync, then pull the other smaller drive and replace with a larger drive to grow the array without reconfiguration. User-upgradable memory; haven't tested it yet but have a 1GB stick to try tonight that will replace the measly 256MB it came with.
Apple does not make products that will fare well in a very bad economy.
Hmmm, what? Have you been in a cave? The iPad and iPhone sales have been most excellent during the bad economy. Reference Apple's sales and stock figures. Compare them to other companies in this period.
So an armchair quarterback of a small 1.2B company thinks he knows more about things than someone who runs a company almost 300 times his size? Things are a bit different at that scale.
Lo said: "Steve Jobs doesn't give me a minute!"
Call the waaaaahmbulance.
"What's the reason for him to trash Flash? There's no reason other than ego," he said.
If he really can't understand the big deal with Flash -- which has been discussed to death -- I don't think he has either the technical background or business acumen to understand why Apple has made their decision.
Maybe instead of worrying about other companies he could focus on his own product support -- I own a Netgear ReadyNAS Duo and have found it underpowered... can't even stream multiple streams at once. Heaven help you if you try to use the included FireFly software while you're copying a large file to the NAS... it just can't handle it. It's best described as a NAS for a single computer... unless you actually want to do 2 things at once with it.
NetGear products are cheap to mid-range products and a bit more attention to detail would help differentiate them. Netgear needs someone to fixate on getting it right rather than getting it out the door.
Perhaps with substantially fewer of these tanks on the road, the average driver won't feel the need to buy bigger and bigger vehicles to compensate for everyone else's monster vehicles?
Sure they have the right to drive whatever, so long as the laws allow it (see my dump truck example). But there's no reason to make it cheap for them to do so. A gasoline tax added on to the existing gas-guzzler tax would help. I'm in agreement with afidel on this one.
BTW, have you thought of the effect these huge tanks have on the rest of the population's vehicle choices? I saw a Smart car just the other day and thought "well that person's dead when an H2 hits him". What right does the Hummer driver have to drive a vehicle substantially more dangerous to others?
How do you like it when the shoe is on the other foot?
I've lived in the area, other than going away once for 3 years and once for 5 years, since 1977. I didn't intend to indicate this was true in all areas.
Maybe not $5 per gallon but I agree with your point. Way too many huge SUV's / large trucks in my area. Nowadays people get them as a defensive measure because "everyone else" has a huge vehicle. It's trending larger and larger every year; I'm not going to be surprised when dump trucks become the norm... unless you make it prohibitively expensive to do that.
Right now it's "in season" here and the parking lot is full of huge SUV's from out-of-state... and most of those people are single or retired so it's not even a "need to pack the 5 kids in the truck" thing (which is a whole 'nother issue). And before someone says "they need a big truck to haul stuff", I've never seen a Porsche Cayenne used for hauling lumber nor do these little old ladies with Escalades likely need to haul large items either.
There's a big difference in those that need a commercial truck for work to haul big things and everybody else. Just like there are HOV lanes for encouraging carpooling, and handicapped tags for those which need it, maybe a work exemption to the tax for those who really need the big trucks would make sense. There's got to be a way to make it not affect those in need while giving a disincentive to those who want to drive tanks.
Or maybe that's all too complicated and ripe for abuse so just up the gas tax and let the people sort it out.
The ribbon reduces productivity on those who need to work with full-page presentations (because the ribbon reduces the vertical working area), forcing you to work at a reduced magnification or with partial pages.
The ribbon also reduces productivity for those of us who use keyboard shortcuts extensively. If I have to use a mouse to do something it's considerably slower.
Make it an option. I don't want 20% of my screen taken up with clickie buttons and other useless garbage. It's a dumbing-down similar to McDonald's cash registers -- give them pictures they can click on so they don't have to remember any menu structures.
A clean interface without clutter is a joy to work in. Every item that takes up space should be important. Menus are a very simple, effective way to hide most of the junk so you can concentrate on the document rather than the tools.
On one extreme you have buttons and widgets and crap all over, looking like some kid just got VB. On the other extreme you have a spartan two-button interface. Now which companies came to mind when you read that?
It's a good thing, it signals they take security seriously. He seems to have impressive credentials. When you've got a target as large as Apple you need to be smart about security.
The ReadyNAS I have uses such an online service -- I think they call it ReadyNAS vault. It bugs me every now and then to enable it.
I think it was around $430 for my unit after buying the 2 drives. I have ssh access and although a bit underpowered once you enable FireFly and have large transfers going on, it's almost silent and does a lot of things. It is a Time Machine-compatible server out of the box too.
Yes external QOS packets don't survive but internal packets serve the purpose in this case. If you have a device acting as a router, you can use ipchains / iptables to assign priority based on origin or destination IP for example.
Some devices, such as Allot's NetEnforcer, do this also in a friendly GUI by port (although the version I used did no stateful packet inspection). By using a Linux / BSD machine you have more options.
I use the Netflix app on Wii. I don't use a browser to select or find movies because I'm lazy. One thing I noticed is you can't really browse the titles on Wii -- only a small subset is shown. But after a few weeks of watching movies it tends to show more that I like. I can always search using the interface if I know part of the name.
That said, there are a lot of things that are inherently more difficult on Windows because of the limited tools available.
For instance, how do you search a file for text, using Windows Server 2000 or 2003 tools? Show only the first or last x lines of a file? Dependably schedule an item to run whether you are logged in or not? Determine which versions of which applications are installed?
Some of these things require WMI which is rather ugly and slow, some require programming (no built-in utility which does this), and some require 3rd party tools (PSTools, Cygwin etc). Connectivity is another issue with Windows, for instance Windows' lack of built-in SSH / sftp tools makes configuring Cisco equipment more difficult than necessary. So there are many issues and limitations with Windows vs *nix.
Windows is more pointy-clicky though, so if you're a weak admin it's easier to use.
I did something like this recently... we had problems with a DC that was changing the time sporadically. Since the times were off by more than 5 minutes they weren't resyncing which was causing all sorts of network problems. I needed to know the local time on the various servers so they could be manually fixed.
On Linux I created a simple 10-line script to run a given command (specified as an argument on the command line) on a hardcoded list of servers. It's almost instant to run... 2 or 3 seconds total for a dozen servers. And since the script was created, I can use this for pretty much anything I want (even if it's a simple "uname -a").
On Windows, I messed around with a lot of different methods and settled on WMI. Not only does Windows 2000 server use different objects for the time than 2003 server, it was painfully slow, taking more than 7 minutes to run on approximately 30 servers. The WMI solution was not reusable.
There may have been a better method, but in a time pinch this was what I did. And in many many other cases, utilities such as "cut", "head", "grep", "tail", "awk" and "sed" have saved me substantial time. Ghostscript is awesome. CUPS backend scripts are extremely useful and let me do things like parse text from an output file and route it accordingly.
Slashdot Mirror
The educated technicians that try to implement this will find their networks shut down in other ways. The average Joe won't use such a network because it's not the default and they don't understand the technology or its implementation. The moment they have trouble with anything it's a reset to vendor-specific settings. The traffic will be shaped because it can be shaped at whim by the ISP; there is no Net Neutrality. So how does this idea succeed?
Idealism is great until it meets reality. That's not saying reality can't be changed BTW, but until it is you have to work within the known parameters or you're accomplishing nothing.
Vendors won't cooperate with this. They want exclusivity to their customers. They don't have the same ideology.
My bigger question is, why can't this sort of content just be delivered in Safari? The answer may be in the in-App charging and DRM, but if so that's a bit of a lame reason. Web sites for major magazines should look this good, on a standard browser.
I hear you, and my guess is all the variables in browsers and formats require resource-consuming (time is money) hacks. It's a pity the standards aren't "standard".
To The Daily's viewpoint, they have a slick-looking app that appears the same on every reader. Support costs are greatly reduced (compared to trying to support all those browsers and platforms) and there's no need to create another digital distribution network. There is no "Slashdot effect" to worry them, that's Apple's problem.
Yep. And $1 a week? That's what, half a Starbucks coffee? It's a no-brainer for the consumer IF the content is decent.
Right now I get my news from a bunch of different electronic sources -- no one source does it all and you have to check multiple sources to get different viewpoints. I check it throughout the day. I won't pay to have a newspaper delivered mostly because I don't like the idea of physical paper, and a lot of it isn't interesting to me. If this could replace several sites then count me in.
By shining a light into a cave you may see enough to avoid danger. You may also awaken a den of bears who attack and eat you. Don't blame the light for the result -- the light is neither good nor evil -- but instead use it to attain knowledge and then use that knowledge for good. Sometimes a frank discussion leads to greater understanding and sometimes it leads to a fight. One hopes we are capable at some point of having that grown-up discussion.
Knowledge almost always leads to problems -- whether that be disillusionment or conflict, whether the incremental achievements cause harm in some way or prevent suffering -- but the pursuit of understanding and aggregating information is what defines us as humans. You can use the knowledge for good or bad purposes. One would hope at some point our human race would progress beyond today's turmoil, but it's going to take time.
Well, he's down to only 1 dancer, so there's a start.
Yeah, the datasheet on the Duo looked great. And it does some of it well. I had a $500 budget and got a blank Duo and 2 2TB drives separately with money to spare. Things I liked included the noise level (it's extremely quiet especially with the 5900 rpm drives I bought). Time Machine support (which works great unless it's doing anything else). SSH access to the device is important to me; that works fine. Email sent whenever status changes or a problem occurs (it's configurable).
Things that sort-of-work: Firmware upgrades sometimes have to be applied multiple times for them to "stick" (and you get an email each time telling you it's been upgraded even when it doesn't "stick"). Since it's using a cheap RISC chip; you're better off treating this as a dumb RAID array than using it to stream or process anything. When I rsync files onto it (I do this for various files not backed up by Time Machine), I found it's much faster to mount it as a drive on my Mac and use the Mac to control the rsync (rather than use the rsync app running on the Duo via SSH).
Things that absolutely don't work include streaming to a non-jailbroken Wii. Printer sharing supposedly works (I have a single "real" computer on my home network) but using the shared printer with iDevices definitely does not. Anything that uses a lot of processor power, such as trying to copy a large file to it while streaming audio, or copying 2 sets of files. Overlapping I/O in other words breaks it. The ability to stream video / audio / pics to my iPad, iPod Touch 2G and iPhone 3GS, sort-of-works only if you have a small library... have tried several apps for that. It's slow as molasses, to the point you can't really use it.
There are features I haven't tested but are very important to me, such as the ability to pull the 2 drives and place them in a higher-end ReadyNAS (with more drive bays) as my needs grow without having to lose everything. The ability to pull a single drive, replace with a larger drive, have it automatically resync, then pull the other smaller drive and replace with a larger drive to grow the array without reconfiguration. User-upgradable memory; haven't tested it yet but have a 1GB stick to try tonight that will replace the measly 256MB it came with.
Apple does not make products that will fare well in a very bad economy.
Hmmm, what? Have you been in a cave? The iPad and iPhone sales have been most excellent during the bad economy. Reference Apple's sales and stock figures. Compare them to other companies in this period.
Lo said: "Steve Jobs doesn't give me a minute!"
Call the waaaaahmbulance.
"What's the reason for him to trash Flash? There's no reason other than ego," he said.
If he really can't understand the big deal with Flash -- which has been discussed to death -- I don't think he has either the technical background or business acumen to understand why Apple has made their decision.
Maybe instead of worrying about other companies he could focus on his own product support -- I own a Netgear ReadyNAS Duo and have found it underpowered... can't even stream multiple streams at once. Heaven help you if you try to use the included FireFly software while you're copying a large file to the NAS... it just can't handle it. It's best described as a NAS for a single computer... unless you actually want to do 2 things at once with it.
NetGear products are cheap to mid-range products and a bit more attention to detail would help differentiate them. Netgear needs someone to fixate on getting it right rather than getting it out the door.
What if it was a very fat deer? : )
(emoticon used to prevent pesky "insightful" mods)
Perhaps with substantially fewer of these tanks on the road, the average driver won't feel the need to buy bigger and bigger vehicles to compensate for everyone else's monster vehicles?
Sure they have the right to drive whatever, so long as the laws allow it (see my dump truck example). But there's no reason to make it cheap for them to do so. A gasoline tax added on to the existing gas-guzzler tax would help. I'm in agreement with afidel on this one.
BTW, have you thought of the effect these huge tanks have on the rest of the population's vehicle choices? I saw a Smart car just the other day and thought "well that person's dead when an H2 hits him". What right does the Hummer driver have to drive a vehicle substantially more dangerous to others?
How do you like it when the shoe is on the other foot?
I've lived in the area, other than going away once for 3 years and once for 5 years, since 1977. I didn't intend to indicate this was true in all areas.
Maybe not $5 per gallon but I agree with your point. Way too many huge SUV's / large trucks in my area. Nowadays people get them as a defensive measure because "everyone else" has a huge vehicle. It's trending larger and larger every year; I'm not going to be surprised when dump trucks become the norm... unless you make it prohibitively expensive to do that.
Right now it's "in season" here and the parking lot is full of huge SUV's from out-of-state... and most of those people are single or retired so it's not even a "need to pack the 5 kids in the truck" thing (which is a whole 'nother issue). And before someone says "they need a big truck to haul stuff", I've never seen a Porsche Cayenne used for hauling lumber nor do these little old ladies with Escalades likely need to haul large items either.
There's a big difference in those that need a commercial truck for work to haul big things and everybody else. Just like there are HOV lanes for encouraging carpooling, and handicapped tags for those which need it, maybe a work exemption to the tax for those who really need the big trucks would make sense. There's got to be a way to make it not affect those in need while giving a disincentive to those who want to drive tanks.
Or maybe that's all too complicated and ripe for abuse so just up the gas tax and let the people sort it out.
The ribbon reduces productivity on those who need to work with full-page presentations (because the ribbon reduces the vertical working area), forcing you to work at a reduced magnification or with partial pages.
The ribbon also reduces productivity for those of us who use keyboard shortcuts extensively. If I have to use a mouse to do something it's considerably slower.
Make it an option. I don't want 20% of my screen taken up with clickie buttons and other useless garbage. It's a dumbing-down similar to McDonald's cash registers -- give them pictures they can click on so they don't have to remember any menu structures.
A clean interface without clutter is a joy to work in. Every item that takes up space should be important. Menus are a very simple, effective way to hide most of the junk so you can concentrate on the document rather than the tools.
On one extreme you have buttons and widgets and crap all over, looking like some kid just got VB. On the other extreme you have a spartan two-button interface. Now which companies came to mind when you read that?
Exactly. Now aim for somewhere in the middle.
It's a good thing, it signals they take security seriously. He seems to have impressive credentials. When you've got a target as large as Apple you need to be smart about security.
Pfft... it's no new thing. See all the CFM files in this folder?
The ReadyNAS I have uses such an online service -- I think they call it ReadyNAS vault. It bugs me every now and then to enable it.
I think it was around $430 for my unit after buying the 2 drives. I have ssh access and although a bit underpowered once you enable FireFly and have large transfers going on, it's almost silent and does a lot of things. It is a Time Machine-compatible server out of the box too.
I bought a ReadyNAS bare and added 2 2TB drives in a mirror. I have a 1.5 TB USB drive which also plugs into the NAS and I rsync them periodically.
Yes external QOS packets don't survive but internal packets serve the purpose in this case. If you have a device acting as a router, you can use ipchains / iptables to assign priority based on origin or destination IP for example.
Some devices, such as Allot's NetEnforcer, do this also in a friendly GUI by port (although the version I used did no stateful packet inspection). By using a Linux / BSD machine you have more options.
I use the Netflix app on Wii. I don't use a browser to select or find movies because I'm lazy. One thing I noticed is you can't really browse the titles on Wii -- only a small subset is shown. But after a few weeks of watching movies it tends to show more that I like. I can always search using the interface if I know part of the name.
QOS is your friend. Various SOHO products provide bandwidth-throttling too. And if you happen to have a Linux box handy...
That said, there are a lot of things that are inherently more difficult on Windows because of the limited tools available.
For instance, how do you search a file for text, using Windows Server 2000 or 2003 tools? Show only the first or last x lines of a file? Dependably schedule an item to run whether you are logged in or not? Determine which versions of which applications are installed?
Some of these things require WMI which is rather ugly and slow, some require programming (no built-in utility which does this), and some require 3rd party tools (PSTools, Cygwin etc). Connectivity is another issue with Windows, for instance Windows' lack of built-in SSH / sftp tools makes configuring Cisco equipment more difficult than necessary. So there are many issues and limitations with Windows vs *nix.
Windows is more pointy-clicky though, so if you're a weak admin it's easier to use.
I did something like this recently... we had problems with a DC that was changing the time sporadically. Since the times were off by more than 5 minutes they weren't resyncing which was causing all sorts of network problems. I needed to know the local time on the various servers so they could be manually fixed.
On Linux I created a simple 10-line script to run a given command (specified as an argument on the command line) on a hardcoded list of servers. It's almost instant to run... 2 or 3 seconds total for a dozen servers. And since the script was created, I can use this for pretty much anything I want (even if it's a simple "uname -a").
On Windows, I messed around with a lot of different methods and settled on WMI. Not only does Windows 2000 server use different objects for the time than 2003 server, it was painfully slow, taking more than 7 minutes to run on approximately 30 servers. The WMI solution was not reusable.
There may have been a better method, but in a time pinch this was what I did. And in many many other cases, utilities such as "cut", "head", "grep", "tail", "awk" and "sed" have saved me substantial time. Ghostscript is awesome. CUPS backend scripts are extremely useful and let me do things like parse text from an output file and route it accordingly.