You hit the nail on the head. There is just so much expertise at building a mainstream Web stack and backend database, that it is almost acting in bad faith not to take advantage of it.
Then there is the security aspect. You can throw money to buy the skills needed at Oracle to have it locked down. Same with Windows, Linux, Solaris or AIX for the OS, Apache or IIS for the webserver, and a backend platform of choice.
Using something so off the beaten path may just mean that something can't be done on the platform, period, be it security modifications that are needed, added capacity, functionality, and them some. With a normal Linux or Windows stack, it would be a matter of enlisting help to work on new DB schema. With this stuff, the talent may not be there.
For them, it is a wise choice. It brings job security using a non mainstream RDBMS, which means that the data would take man-years to be migrated to Oracle, DB/2, or even MS SQL server which may not have the horsepower of a SPARC or POWER7 box, but one can always partition and cluster the RDBMS. It also is expensive to keep maintained, so it provides additional job security, as the expertise for this architecture is rare.
Great win for the contracting company. Big loss for everyone else.
What would happen is that CEO pay would end up being paid at the maximum... but there are many ways to give people value. Offshore bank accounts are one way, a wallet full of BitCoins can be another. Or if one wanted to be extremely low tech about it, large precious metal purchases physically handed to the person.
Instead, if one wanted something, try for a tax, not a ban. Bans, if they are worked around (which they will be) completely fail. However, a tax that a few people find a workaround still succeeds.
I don't like even mentioning this this, but if a country wanted a maximum wage, have an income tax curve with a sharp spike at the upper end. This can be worked around, but at least it brings some partial compliance.
The closest was the Eastern US in the late 1800s, post Civil War, where government was a completely laissez faire entity.
This resulted in a few people (Carnegie and Frick for example) being quite wealthy, while most Americans were duking it out among floods of immigrants for menial work, companies owned their own towns (and being fired meant getting kicked out of one's community), and one was expected to work seven days a week, or else replaced by someone who would at a lower pay rate.
I'm hoping that this concept can give phones that would be nice, but not intended for for the lowest common denominator. For example, it would be nice to have a decent landscape slider (the old Motorola Droid for example) with a quality hardware keyboard, and since sliders don't have to be extremely thin, this would allow for a better battery, higher resolution camera, or perhaps a decent amount of storage as well as a MicroSD card in an easy to insert place (so it would be easy to swap cards for nandroid backups.)
Of course, unlocked bootloaders go without saying.
There will be landlords who will tell them, "if you want chargers, find some place that has them." Of course, there will be places that will have them... but their rent will more than offset those costs. Especially in towns like Austin where apartments get filled up regardless of amenities.
It may make a good selling point, but it likely will come with a pretty stiff price tag, likely more cost total than the costs of a gasser.
What I've wondered about is why an EV vehicle maker do what a lot of RVs makers do... install an Onan, Kohler, or other inbuilt generator. This way, the vehicle can be truly an EV, and the only thing different is a fuel tank, genset, and charger for the battery, components which are already off the shelf and very well tested, so long term upkeep would be fairly easy.
As a devil's advocate, there is another technology which gives very high MPG, and that would be the turbo diesel engine. They may not be hybrid models or EVs, but they are very economical, and because they usually have some form of turbo, they don't lose much in the way of power at higher altitudes.
I'm sure the next step within the next few years will be hybrid diesel/electric vehicles.
In most cities, who really needs horsepower when at most you have a couple hundred feet between lights, or 5-10 feet away from the next bumper ahead. Crowded towns is where an EV or a hybrid shines. When stuck in traffic, you are using zero fuel other than what keeps the A/C going unlike an IC engine where it is still spinning at 800 or so RPM when stopped.
IMHO, the Volt or a Plug in Prius [1] is a pretty decent all around vehicle for all but off-road use. They use no fuel if one plans a daily commute, but for longer trips, no worries... the gas engine will take care of keeping the battery topped off. To boot, with a decent PSW inverter, the vehicle acts as a very efficient generator in a pinch.
Another EV that I've seen people swear by is Mitsubishi's i-MiEV. I have a cow-orker who has one, and it does the job for short range commutes quite well. There is something nice about highway speeds, and little to no engine noise.
Of course, because I live in Texas and some roads I end up on are quite rough, it would be nice to have an EV pickup. Hopefully the mention by Elon Musk about making one comes true. It would mean being able to go on some roads that would eat most car axles for lunch and finish up with the oil pan as an after-dinner tipple. All for $0 in fuel costs. To boot, electric motors get their max torque at 0 RPM, which is even better for towing.
Solar doesn't have the oomph to be completely self-sufficient with charging a pickup, but in west Texas where wind is heavy and constant, a solid wind farm might be able to keep a few EVs ready to go.
Infrastructure is a concern. A house, there isn't an issue to install a proper charger. However, more people tend to live in apartments or multi-family housing, and the HOA or apartment management can be disinterested at best to install electric facilities (to them a cost center, even though it may attract new tenents or owners.) In a lot of places, getting an apartment complex to fix a clogged toilet is extremely tough, much less spending the cash to add the circuits added to support the amperage of chargers.
grr, make that hours of useful time (bad autocorrect... bad.)
MMOs have stagnated over the past few years. I'm glad to be seeing something relatively different pop up in a game which should have some staying power.
Landmark sounds interesting to me... enough that I just put a C-note for a preorder, possibly against my better judgement, but if I divide that up in hours of useful crime, it isn't that much overall.
MMO-wise, SOE has been a wildcard, but they haven't gone too overboard with F2P mechanics. Unlike other F2P games, I don't have to buy keys to unlock chests, and one can level to endgame without paying a cent, or have to buy armor in order to survive in any endgame raid.
I'm not a fan of the Landmark graphics, but I'm guessing they have to be fairly lightweight in order to support the voxel code and the randomly generated terrain (unlike other MMOs where the terrain is rendered and touched up by hand.)
Nuclear weapons take a lot of processing, be it getting the raw materials (only available from a few spots), refining it (very tough), refining it further to be able to be used (even more tough), and getting it working.
You can buy a "drone" for $100 from woot.com, and unlike nukes where no matter how better technology gets, the stuff needed stays rare, AIs will always improve, and the hardware needed is very common.
I've been thinking of trying EVE, but was warned off when watching other people play and the antics done in various areas of space. It sort of reminded me of UO:
"thou hast left the protection of the guards" "OoOoOoOoO"
Are you forced to join a corp or face constant podding in EVE, or is that hype?
Even Everquest has been made easier, and it is generally better, as the challenge is still there. If I could get over the relative antiquated UI and start back, it is a pretty decent game now. The days of losing all your gear are long gone (a trip to the Guild Lobby, a mash of a veteran's AA, or if gone for a while, a visit to Shadowrest would get one's stuff back.) With a merc, all classes can solo fairly easily.
Even though one can solo, the game is still a group game... there isn't much endgame that isn't involving groups/raids.
I wouldn't mind a PvE game with all the complexity of EQ1 (where classes didn't just get a few spells, but a lot of them that sometimes were next to useless, but that one situation they came in handy, it would help immensely.) Would I want to risk losing all gear on a failed Fear break. Not really. Would I want to try to raid Kael while another guild is training mobs constantly in hopes of wiping? No. However, just the amount of content in the game is astounding.
The WoW improvements just mean that you read EJ, follow their instructions for the class you are playing, select the talents they point out, play the rot they instruct, and gear up exactly as stated, or else you will lose your raid spot to someone who does do that.
What would be great would be Everquest 2's loot system (and augments, similar to having all items be socketed), Rift's soul trees, Everquest 1's AAs, and maybe a fairly short class selection like WoW's that is more than "Rift's "fighter/mage/cleric/thief" archetypes. Add in abilities/talents for every class to heal/melee DPS/range DPS/tank (which Rift purports to add in come 3.0), and it would allow for an interesting group dynamic.
I keep my EQ1 subscription up, but the old UI just bugs me after being used to modern MMOs, so that gets in the way. However, for PvE content, bar none, EQ1 is king and emperor. There is a lot to do, although some of the more older content may not be worth the time (epic 1.0 quests for the most part.)
WoW is good with friends, but I just get bored there, especially when the mindless dailies have changed to goofing around on Timeless Isle where it feels like a playground... kick over this turtle, get a purple. Kick open a random chest, another purple. Jump in, toss some spells at one of the spirits, etc.
The next expansion announcement didn't help much, especially with flight (which previously was something you got once you hit top level) becoming apparently a months long grindfest similar to the artifact cloak [1]. WoW has a lot of cool single player intro quests (such as the Thunder King Isle quest arc), but once done, things can be really random. One night may be OK, another night can be a complete waste of time with pickup raids. Of course, chat in towns is banal at best.
For being able to tune stats and your exact DPS/heal/tank play style, Rift was great. However, since they put raid level gear for sale in their RMT store, I just lost all interest in the game whatsoever, even though I have bought a multi-year subscription. The fact that they are going to have an entire expansion that is like one big Kedge Keep doesn't help either.
These days, I've ended up on EQ2. Its population isn't huge, but people know what they are doing in groups/raids, and even the trolls in General chat are intelligent. The devs know how to make combat and such work in zones with flight, so each expansion doesn't take flight away from the players in order to have decent content progression. EQ2 also has a nice tradeskill faculty so one can actually wind up in endgame areas at a low adventure level, which can help later on.
The game that had so much promise, IMHO, was Vanguard. I wish that it could have been kept under development for at least a year, perhaps 18 months. That would have been a solid MMO, and a decent challenge for PvE. However, these days, even though EQ2 doesn't have the cool quests like rolling down the Great Wall, it has very good content all around from solo to group to raid. Plus, one can start at level 85, so one can hit endgame raiding fairly quickly, although there is a lot of interesting content to be seen at lower levels (Sol eye especially.)
I have some hopes for Everquest: Next, but the graphics are off-putting (it looks like a 1950s cartoon and a WoW character model had offspring.) However, gameplay is what matters, so I'm going to wait and see on that.
IMHO, I dislike F2P, because it implies P2W. EQ2 is probably the best balance -- other than starting at level 85, there are no raid level items (other than appearance stuff) that one can just buy. Gear still has to be earned to hit ToV or other endgame places. No chest and keys system either. What you loot is what you get.
Of course, there are other MMOs, but when you get PK-ed when you create your first character before you ever load completely into the newbie zone makes the games an instant turn-off, or even better, you keep getting killed repeatedly at the respawn point until you just kill the game client.
[1]: I'd hate to deal with the next expansion on a PvP server. Flight means being able to get somewhere versus becoming someone's HKs, so it just makes playing less worth it if one is on those realms.
Even the PHBs want to keep company E-mail in-house for fear that a provider could use their personal communications stored for 7 years due to SOX rules against them later on.
I've seen some places tend to have their top brass on an in-house Exchange system, while lower levels might end up on Azure or a cloud provider.
Exchange is pretty easy to get up and running, especially if AD is in place. It has decent anti-spam filters that you can turn on out of the box for the edge server, and works fairly decently. Only real third party program needed would be something to ensure mailboxes are backed up regularly and possibly archived offline due to regulations and e-Discovery laws.
The GOP allowed solar -production- to be kicked over to China. First, the solar companies were complaining about Chinese intrusion attempts, then China started dumping panels on our shores for cheaper than it cost US makers to buy the rare earths.
However, the split is going along two lines of two GOP platforms. Dislike for government versus respect for Big Oil/Big Coal. Solar allows people to be fairly independent [1].
Solar also scales well. One can have a one watt panel to keep a vent fan spinning on a RV's roof, or a multi-megawatt array powering a city like Austin.
Solar is also fairly easy to deploy. Got a clear line of sight to the south? Might as well slap a few panels up, add a grid-tie inverter, and have a lower power bill, or if in a more rural area, have the power feed into a battery bank for complete off-grid use, or even a combination of both with some outlets in a house on utility powers, others feeding from the batteries. Same thing if one has a carport. Might as well have the flat roof do something.
As for price, solar panel prices have gotten to a point where it becomes a "why not?" as opposed to a "why bother?" This is especially true in the RV industry.
[1]: Almost. Good luck having a modern building in the southern US without air conditioning unless one is content to deal with high humidity.
In 2003, Sarbanes-Oxley was passed, forcing companies to have to buy SANs just to stick E-mail for long term storage/archiving.
For the most part, things have been fairly static, except with new buzzwords and somewhat new concepts. A few things that have changed:
1: Converged SAN fabric. Rather than have a FC switch and a network switch, people are moving to FCoE or just going back to tried and true iSCSI which doesn't require one to fuss around with zoning and such.
2: Deduplication. We had VMs in '03, but now, whole infrastructures use that, so having disk images on a partition where only one image is stored and only diffs are stored for other machines saves a lot of space.
3: RAID 6 becomes necessary. I/O hasn't gone up as much as other things, so the time it takes to rebuild a blown disk is pretty big. So, RAID 6 becomes a must so degraded volumes rebuild.
4: People stop using tape and go with replication and more piles of hard disks for archiving. Loosely coupled SAN storage in a hot recovery center becomes a common practice to ensure SAN data is backed up... or at least accessible.
5: VMs use SAN snapshots for virus scanning. A rootkit can hide in memory, but any footprints on the disk will be found by the SAN controller running AV software and can be automatically rolled back.
6: We went from E-mailed Trojans, macro viruses, and attacks on firewalls and unprotected machines to having the Web browser being the main point of attack for malware intrusion. It has been stated on/. that ad servers have become instrumental in widespread infections.
7: The average desktop computer finally has separate user/admin access contexts. Before Vista, this was one and the same in Windows, allowing something to pwn a box quite easily.
8: The OS now has additional safeguards in place, be it SELinux, Window's Low security tokens, or otherwise. This way, something taking over a Web browser may not be able to seize a user's access context as easily.
9: BYOD has become an issue. Ten years ago, people fawned over RAZR-type devices and an IT person had a Bat Belt of devices, be it the digital camera, MP3 player, the PDA, the pager, the cellphone, and the Blackberry for messaging. Around -05, Windows Mobile merged all of this into one device, and '07 brought us the iPhone which made the masses desire one device, not a belt full.
10: Tablets went from embedded devices to on desktops and big media consumption items.
11: Music piracy was rampant, so one threat was people adding unexpected "functionality" to DMZ servers by having them run P2P functionality (AudioGalaxy, eMule, etc.)
12: We did not have to have a Windows activation infrastructure and fabric in place, where machines had to have some internal access to a KMS box to keep running. XP and Windows Server 2003 had volume editions which once handed a key would update and were happy for good.
13: UNIX sendmail was often used for mail before virtually everyone switched over wholesale to Exchange.
14: Hard disk encryption was fairly rare. You had to find a utility like SafeBoot or use loopback encrypted partitions on the Linux side for data protection. This was after the NGTCB/Palladium fiasco, so TPM chips were not mainstream.
15: One still bought discrete hardware for hosts, because VMs were present for devs, but not really "earned their bones" in production. So, you would see plenty of 2-3U racks with SCSI drives in them for drive arrays.
Things that have stayed the same, ironically enough:
1: Bandwidth on the WAN. The big changes came and went after initial offerings of cable and DSL. After that, bandwidth costs pretty much have not changed, except for more fees added.
2: Physical security. Other than the HID card and maybe the guard at the desk, data center physical security has not changed much. Some places might offer a fingerprint or iris scanner, but nothing new there that wasn't around in 2003. Only major di
Here in Texas, even without fracking, the stinky areas of the state (Texas City, Luling, etc.) have natural gas in abundance, even without resorting to fracking.
With a salesperson, they know better... they are willing to say anything to make a deal... The adage of "how do you know when a salesdroid is lying? Their lips are moving." holds quite true.
I'm not exactly a car salesperson's best target. I don't change vehicles often, and I keep my old vehicles, so trades are not a game they can play. When I go to buy, I end up speccing out exactly from the manufacturer I am looking for after doing my homework [1].
[1]: Things like specifying additional keys with the order since an additional $100 is cheaper than $500 per key once the vehicle is at the dealer, or making sure a diesel has a variable high idle option so the DPF [2] does not get plugged.
[2]: I envy Europeans in this area. They get real diesels that don't need concentrated urine to function, nor excessive emissions which do little to no better for air cleaning than the existing ones.
If one has USAA or a similar insurance company, they usually have a program where one can buy through them and get a vehicle for invoice or invoice a C-note.
This is why car dealers are so deathly afraid of Tesla -- their games and shenanigans just don't fly when one can purchase a car without haggling, lowballing, or dealing with the manager/sales droid shell game.
Of course, if you want to know liars, try buying an RV in the US. In Europe and Australia, any rig will be of decent quality. Here, it is expected that they will be rendered into scrap by water damage if you buy one, unless it is one of a few rare makes and models (Coach House, Livin' Lite, Casita.) With RVs, there is no official MSRP often, it becomes more annoying to buy something.
Had a guy call about that at work pretending to be "tech support" last year.
The only problem is that regedit doesn't do much on AIX7, nor does attempting to run Win32/Win64 based executables. I asked him if he knew any patch to get POWER7 to work with this... needless to say, the conversation didn't last long.
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You hit the nail on the head. There is just so much expertise at building a mainstream Web stack and backend database, that it is almost acting in bad faith not to take advantage of it.
Then there is the security aspect. You can throw money to buy the skills needed at Oracle to have it locked down. Same with Windows, Linux, Solaris or AIX for the OS, Apache or IIS for the webserver, and a backend platform of choice.
Using something so off the beaten path may just mean that something can't be done on the platform, period, be it security modifications that are needed, added capacity, functionality, and them some. With a normal Linux or Windows stack, it would be a matter of enlisting help to work on new DB schema. With this stuff, the talent may not be there.
For them, it is a wise choice. It brings job security using a non mainstream RDBMS, which means that the data would take man-years to be migrated to Oracle, DB/2, or even MS SQL server which may not have the horsepower of a SPARC or POWER7 box, but one can always partition and cluster the RDBMS. It also is expensive to keep maintained, so it provides additional job security, as the expertise for this architecture is rare.
Great win for the contracting company. Big loss for everyone else.
What would happen is that CEO pay would end up being paid at the maximum... but there are many ways to give people value. Offshore bank accounts are one way, a wallet full of BitCoins can be another. Or if one wanted to be extremely low tech about it, large precious metal purchases physically handed to the person.
Instead, if one wanted something, try for a tax, not a ban. Bans, if they are worked around (which they will be) completely fail. However, a tax that a few people find a workaround still succeeds.
I don't like even mentioning this this, but if a country wanted a maximum wage, have an income tax curve with a sharp spike at the upper end. This can be worked around, but at least it brings some partial compliance.
The closest was the Eastern US in the late 1800s, post Civil War, where government was a completely laissez faire entity.
This resulted in a few people (Carnegie and Frick for example) being quite wealthy, while most Americans were duking it out among floods of immigrants for menial work, companies owned their own towns (and being fired meant getting kicked out of one's community), and one was expected to work seven days a week, or else replaced by someone who would at a lower pay rate.
I'm hoping that this concept can give phones that would be nice, but not intended for for the lowest common denominator. For example, it would be nice to have a decent landscape slider (the old Motorola Droid for example) with a quality hardware keyboard, and since sliders don't have to be extremely thin, this would allow for a better battery, higher resolution camera, or perhaps a decent amount of storage as well as a MicroSD card in an easy to insert place (so it would be easy to swap cards for nandroid backups.)
Of course, unlocked bootloaders go without saying.
There will be landlords who will tell them, "if you want chargers, find some place that has them." Of course, there will be places that will have them... but their rent will more than offset those costs. Especially in towns like Austin where apartments get filled up regardless of amenities.
It may make a good selling point, but it likely will come with a pretty stiff price tag, likely more cost total than the costs of a gasser.
What I've wondered about is why an EV vehicle maker do what a lot of RVs makers do... install an Onan, Kohler, or other inbuilt generator. This way, the vehicle can be truly an EV, and the only thing different is a fuel tank, genset, and charger for the battery, components which are already off the shelf and very well tested, so long term upkeep would be fairly easy.
As a devil's advocate, there is another technology which gives very high MPG, and that would be the turbo diesel engine. They may not be hybrid models or EVs, but they are very economical, and because they usually have some form of turbo, they don't lose much in the way of power at higher altitudes.
I'm sure the next step within the next few years will be hybrid diesel/electric vehicles.
In most cities, who really needs horsepower when at most you have a couple hundred feet between lights, or 5-10 feet away from the next bumper ahead. Crowded towns is where an EV or a hybrid shines. When stuck in traffic, you are using zero fuel other than what keeps the A/C going unlike an IC engine where it is still spinning at 800 or so RPM when stopped.
IMHO, the Volt or a Plug in Prius [1] is a pretty decent all around vehicle for all but off-road use. They use no fuel if one plans a daily commute, but for longer trips, no worries... the gas engine will take care of keeping the battery topped off. To boot, with a decent PSW inverter, the vehicle acts as a very efficient generator in a pinch.
Another EV that I've seen people swear by is Mitsubishi's i-MiEV. I have a cow-orker who has one, and it does the job for short range commutes quite well. There is something nice about highway speeds, and little to no engine noise.
Of course, because I live in Texas and some roads I end up on are quite rough, it would be nice to have an EV pickup. Hopefully the mention by Elon Musk about making one comes true. It would mean being able to go on some roads that would eat most car axles for lunch and finish up with the oil pan as an after-dinner tipple. All for $0 in fuel costs. To boot, electric motors get their max torque at 0 RPM, which is even better for towing.
Solar doesn't have the oomph to be completely self-sufficient with charging a pickup, but in west Texas where wind is heavy and constant, a solid wind farm might be able to keep a few EVs ready to go.
[1]: Yet another vehicle not sold in Texas.
Infrastructure is a concern. A house, there isn't an issue to install a proper charger. However, more people tend to live in apartments or multi-family housing, and the HOA or apartment management can be disinterested at best to install electric facilities (to them a cost center, even though it may attract new tenents or owners.) In a lot of places, getting an apartment complex to fix a clogged toilet is extremely tough, much less spending the cash to add the circuits added to support the amperage of chargers.
grr, make that hours of useful time (bad autocorrect... bad.)
MMOs have stagnated over the past few years. I'm glad to be seeing something relatively different pop up in a game which should have some staying power.
Landmark sounds interesting to me... enough that I just put a C-note for a preorder, possibly against my better judgement, but if I divide that up in hours of useful crime, it isn't that much overall.
MMO-wise, SOE has been a wildcard, but they haven't gone too overboard with F2P mechanics. Unlike other F2P games, I don't have to buy keys to unlock chests, and one can level to endgame without paying a cent, or have to buy armor in order to survive in any endgame raid.
I'm not a fan of the Landmark graphics, but I'm guessing they have to be fairly lightweight in order to support the voxel code and the randomly generated terrain (unlike other MMOs where the terrain is rendered and touched up by hand.)
Worth a shot, as it is definitely something new.
Nuclear weapons take a lot of processing, be it getting the raw materials (only available from a few spots), refining it (very tough), refining it further to be able to be used (even more tough), and getting it working.
You can buy a "drone" for $100 from woot.com, and unlike nukes where no matter how better technology gets, the stuff needed stays rare, AIs will always improve, and the hardware needed is very common.
I've been thinking of trying EVE, but was warned off when watching other people play and the antics done in various areas of space. It sort of reminded me of UO:
"thou hast left the protection of the guards"
"OoOoOoOoO"
Are you forced to join a corp or face constant podding in EVE, or is that hype?
Even Everquest has been made easier, and it is generally better, as the challenge is still there. If I could get over the relative antiquated UI and start back, it is a pretty decent game now. The days of losing all your gear are long gone (a trip to the Guild Lobby, a mash of a veteran's AA, or if gone for a while, a visit to Shadowrest would get one's stuff back.) With a merc, all classes can solo fairly easily.
Even though one can solo, the game is still a group game... there isn't much endgame that isn't involving groups/raids.
I wouldn't mind a PvE game with all the complexity of EQ1 (where classes didn't just get a few spells, but a lot of them that sometimes were next to useless, but that one situation they came in handy, it would help immensely.) Would I want to risk losing all gear on a failed Fear break. Not really. Would I want to try to raid Kael while another guild is training mobs constantly in hopes of wiping? No. However, just the amount of content in the game is astounding.
Clichequest would be nice if it ever gets released. The Plane of Cheese previews are mind-blowing.
The WoW improvements just mean that you read EJ, follow their instructions for the class you are playing, select the talents they point out, play the rot they instruct, and gear up exactly as stated, or else you will lose your raid spot to someone who does do that.
What would be great would be Everquest 2's loot system (and augments, similar to having all items be socketed), Rift's soul trees, Everquest 1's AAs, and maybe a fairly short class selection like WoW's that is more than "Rift's "fighter/mage/cleric/thief" archetypes. Add in abilities/talents for every class to heal/melee DPS/range DPS/tank (which Rift purports to add in come 3.0), and it would allow for an interesting group dynamic.
I keep my EQ1 subscription up, but the old UI just bugs me after being used to modern MMOs, so that gets in the way. However, for PvE content, bar none, EQ1 is king and emperor. There is a lot to do, although some of the more older content may not be worth the time (epic 1.0 quests for the most part.)
WoW is good with friends, but I just get bored there, especially when the mindless dailies have changed to goofing around on Timeless Isle where it feels like a playground... kick over this turtle, get a purple. Kick open a random chest, another purple. Jump in, toss some spells at one of the spirits, etc.
The next expansion announcement didn't help much, especially with flight (which previously was something you got once you hit top level) becoming apparently a months long grindfest similar to the artifact cloak [1]. WoW has a lot of cool single player intro quests (such as the Thunder King Isle quest arc), but once done, things can be really random. One night may be OK, another night can be a complete waste of time with pickup raids. Of course, chat in towns is banal at best.
For being able to tune stats and your exact DPS/heal/tank play style, Rift was great. However, since they put raid level gear for sale in their RMT store, I just lost all interest in the game whatsoever, even though I have bought a multi-year subscription. The fact that they are going to have an entire expansion that is like one big Kedge Keep doesn't help either.
These days, I've ended up on EQ2. Its population isn't huge, but people know what they are doing in groups/raids, and even the trolls in General chat are intelligent. The devs know how to make combat and such work in zones with flight, so each expansion doesn't take flight away from the players in order to have decent content progression. EQ2 also has a nice tradeskill faculty so one can actually wind up in endgame areas at a low adventure level, which can help later on.
The game that had so much promise, IMHO, was Vanguard. I wish that it could have been kept under development for at least a year, perhaps 18 months. That would have been a solid MMO, and a decent challenge for PvE. However, these days, even though EQ2 doesn't have the cool quests like rolling down the Great Wall, it has very good content all around from solo to group to raid. Plus, one can start at level 85, so one can hit endgame raiding fairly quickly, although there is a lot of interesting content to be seen at lower levels (Sol eye especially.)
I have some hopes for Everquest: Next, but the graphics are off-putting (it looks like a 1950s cartoon and a WoW character model had offspring.) However, gameplay is what matters, so I'm going to wait and see on that.
IMHO, I dislike F2P, because it implies P2W. EQ2 is probably the best balance -- other than starting at level 85, there are no raid level items (other than appearance stuff) that one can just buy. Gear still has to be earned to hit ToV or other endgame places. No chest and keys system either. What you loot is what you get.
Of course, there are other MMOs, but when you get PK-ed when you create your first character before you ever load completely into the newbie zone makes the games an instant turn-off, or even better, you keep getting killed repeatedly at the respawn point until you just kill the game client.
[1]: I'd hate to deal with the next expansion on a PvP server. Flight means being able to get somewhere versus becoming someone's HKs, so it just makes playing less worth it if one is on those realms.
My experience mirrors yours.
Even the PHBs want to keep company E-mail in-house for fear that a provider could use their personal communications stored for 7 years due to SOX rules against them later on.
I've seen some places tend to have their top brass on an in-house Exchange system, while lower levels might end up on Azure or a cloud provider.
Exchange is pretty easy to get up and running, especially if AD is in place. It has decent anti-spam filters that you can turn on out of the box for the edge server, and works fairly decently. Only real third party program needed would be something to ensure mailboxes are backed up regularly and possibly archived offline due to regulations and e-Discovery laws.
The GOP allowed solar -production- to be kicked over to China. First, the solar companies were complaining about Chinese intrusion attempts, then China started dumping panels on our shores for cheaper than it cost US makers to buy the rare earths.
However, the split is going along two lines of two GOP platforms. Dislike for government versus respect for Big Oil/Big Coal. Solar allows people to be fairly independent [1].
Solar also scales well. One can have a one watt panel to keep a vent fan spinning on a RV's roof, or a multi-megawatt array powering a city like Austin.
Solar is also fairly easy to deploy. Got a clear line of sight to the south? Might as well slap a few panels up, add a grid-tie inverter, and have a lower power bill, or if in a more rural area, have the power feed into a battery bank for complete off-grid use, or even a combination of both with some outlets in a house on utility powers, others feeding from the batteries. Same thing if one has a carport. Might as well have the flat roof do something.
As for price, solar panel prices have gotten to a point where it becomes a "why not?" as opposed to a "why bother?" This is especially true in the RV industry.
[1]: Almost. Good luck having a modern building in the southern US without air conditioning unless one is content to deal with high humidity.
In 2003, Sarbanes-Oxley was passed, forcing companies to have to buy SANs just to stick E-mail for long term storage/archiving.
For the most part, things have been fairly static, except with new buzzwords and somewhat new concepts. A few things that have changed:
1: Converged SAN fabric. Rather than have a FC switch and a network switch, people are moving to FCoE or just going back to tried and true iSCSI which doesn't require one to fuss around with zoning and such.
2: Deduplication. We had VMs in '03, but now, whole infrastructures use that, so having disk images on a partition where only one image is stored and only diffs are stored for other machines saves a lot of space.
3: RAID 6 becomes necessary. I/O hasn't gone up as much as other things, so the time it takes to rebuild a blown disk is pretty big. So, RAID 6 becomes a must so degraded volumes rebuild.
4: People stop using tape and go with replication and more piles of hard disks for archiving. Loosely coupled SAN storage in a hot recovery center becomes a common practice to ensure SAN data is backed up... or at least accessible.
5: VMs use SAN snapshots for virus scanning. A rootkit can hide in memory, but any footprints on the disk will be found by the SAN controller running AV software and can be automatically rolled back.
6: We went from E-mailed Trojans, macro viruses, and attacks on firewalls and unprotected machines to having the Web browser being the main point of attack for malware intrusion. It has been stated on /. that ad servers have become instrumental in widespread infections.
7: The average desktop computer finally has separate user/admin access contexts. Before Vista, this was one and the same in Windows, allowing something to pwn a box quite easily.
8: The OS now has additional safeguards in place, be it SELinux, Window's Low security tokens, or otherwise. This way, something taking over a Web browser may not be able to seize a user's access context as easily.
9: BYOD has become an issue. Ten years ago, people fawned over RAZR-type devices and an IT person had a Bat Belt of devices, be it the digital camera, MP3 player, the PDA, the pager, the cellphone, and the Blackberry for messaging. Around -05, Windows Mobile merged all of this into one device, and '07 brought us the iPhone which made the masses desire one device, not a belt full.
10: Tablets went from embedded devices to on desktops and big media consumption items.
11: Music piracy was rampant, so one threat was people adding unexpected "functionality" to DMZ servers by having them run P2P functionality (AudioGalaxy, eMule, etc.)
12: We did not have to have a Windows activation infrastructure and fabric in place, where machines had to have some internal access to a KMS box to keep running. XP and Windows Server 2003 had volume editions which once handed a key would update and were happy for good.
13: UNIX sendmail was often used for mail before virtually everyone switched over wholesale to Exchange.
14: Hard disk encryption was fairly rare. You had to find a utility like SafeBoot or use loopback encrypted partitions on the Linux side for data protection. This was after the NGTCB/Palladium fiasco, so TPM chips were not mainstream.
15: One still bought discrete hardware for hosts, because VMs were present for devs, but not really "earned their bones" in production. So, you would see plenty of 2-3U racks with SCSI drives in them for drive arrays.
Things that have stayed the same, ironically enough:
1: Bandwidth on the WAN. The big changes came and went after initial offerings of cable and DSL. After that, bandwidth costs pretty much have not changed, except for more fees added.
2: Physical security. Other than the HID card and maybe the guard at the desk, data center physical security has not changed much. Some places might offer a fingerprint or iris scanner, but nothing new there that wasn't around in 2003. Only major di
Here in Texas, even without fracking, the stinky areas of the state (Texas City, Luling, etc.) have natural gas in abundance, even without resorting to fracking.
Might as well use it for something.
With a salesperson, they know better... they are willing to say anything to make a deal... The adage of "how do you know when a salesdroid is lying? Their lips are moving." holds quite true.
I'm not exactly a car salesperson's best target. I don't change vehicles often, and I keep my old vehicles, so trades are not a game they can play. When I go to buy, I end up speccing out exactly from the manufacturer I am looking for after doing my homework [1].
[1]: Things like specifying additional keys with the order since an additional $100 is cheaper than $500 per key once the vehicle is at the dealer, or making sure a diesel has a variable high idle option so the DPF [2] does not get plugged.
[2]: I envy Europeans in this area. They get real diesels that don't need concentrated urine to function, nor excessive emissions which do little to no better for air cleaning than the existing ones.
If one has USAA or a similar insurance company, they usually have a program where one can buy through them and get a vehicle for invoice or invoice a C-note.
This is why car dealers are so deathly afraid of Tesla -- their games and shenanigans just don't fly when one can purchase a car without haggling, lowballing, or dealing with the manager/sales droid shell game.
Of course, if you want to know liars, try buying an RV in the US. In Europe and Australia, any rig will be of decent quality. Here, it is expected that they will be rendered into scrap by water damage if you buy one, unless it is one of a few rare makes and models (Coach House, Livin' Lite, Casita.) With RVs, there is no official MSRP often, it becomes more annoying to buy something.
Had a guy call about that at work pretending to be "tech support" last year.
The only problem is that regedit doesn't do much on AIX7, nor does attempting to run Win32/Win64 based executables. I asked him if he knew any patch to get POWER7 to work with this... needless to say, the conversation didn't last long.