A bigger problem for Microsoft is that businesses are finding the entire office suite software to be limiting, outdated, and expensive. Have you tried using Word, Excel or PowerPoint to create web content? Sure, you can export and tie in to other tools and databases, but the page centric approach of these tools is different from what people are beginning to prefer. Now everyone wants content that is readable on a mobile device or via feed.
Even in a traditional office setting the requirement for documentation is being replaced by Wiki. Sure, there's something to be said for printed manuals, but many places are finding it easier to store their documentation (especially fast changing ones) in an online tool that can auto-create paged documentation. Spreadsheets? Yes, I still have managers requesting documentation in a spreadsheet format, even if I store it in a wiki or in an automated tool. E.g., I use a monitoring tool that provides up-to-the-second information on hardware and software but some managers still prefer a static Excel spreadsheet. But that's changing because even the dinosaurs have to answer to the higher ups when it comes to cutting needless work (well, at least I can hope). And Powerpoint? Slides and business meetings seem to go hand in hand. Maybe the sales folks will continue to use it. Except when I get a request to specifically put it in PowerPoint, I'll either just bring up the web page live or use a PDF.
You fail. Obviously you haven't worked in other large companies. In many companies besides UPS the term "internal customers" is used to differentiate external customers from the people running the business.
When I worked front-line IT support for UPS back in the 90s, I had to wear dress slacks and a tie. If I was visiting customers I had to wear a suit. This would not be a big deal if the customers worked in offices, but for the most part they worked in the shipping department which was usually in the warehouse which was usually the hottest and dustiest place in the building. Even for internal customers it was a pain. A UPS shipping facility is filthy. There's dust, dirt, grime and it's not air-conditioned. A lot times I was crawling under carts, going up in ceilings to trace cabling, Wearing dress clothes in this environment sucked. Not only did I get filthy almost every day, but my clothes didn't last very long at all.
And I had to walk uphill across conveyor belts to and from school.
I hated the Microsoft ads for the same reason I hate a bunch of other computer ads... they are patronizing. Somewhere some marketer read some demographic data that says that some celebrity is watched by a target audience. The marketer decides to create an ad based on this celebrity endorsement. The ad content doesn't matter, but the marketer believes that because they brought in that celebrity the target demographic will like the product.
They do this when creating ads, movies, television shows; the idea being that the content doesn't really matter as long as they get the scenery correct.
Listen to a concept band recently? It's the same idea. There's an ensemble cast of a Thinker, a Rebel, a Button Down Guy, an Outcast. Every one is chosen not on their talent, but on their appeal to a target demographic.
The Hansel and Gretel story, even in its modern incarnation, seems the wrong message: Two juveniles wander around the forest unsupervised. They vandalize then enter the house of an elderly woman. When the woman catches them and locks them up in preparation for calling the proper authorities (or the parents), the kids break out and murder the woman by pushing her into the fire.
I bookmark the NASA feeds directly in VLC on Linux so I can play them without a browser opened. To do so, open the following in VLC or your media player:
I actually have the players embedded into my desktop which has lots of blinken lights, wireframe space animations and krellm monitors on an Apollo background.
As far back as I can remember, religion and gaming go hand in hand. For example, if you prayed in Nethack, you could be gifted with potions of healing. Or if you sacrificed a fresh kill at an altar, you may gain favor with your god. But don't sacrifice your puppy because someone may get upset.
In Fallout 2 I learned that Hubologists are a great source of grenades. They keep to themselves except when they're out warring with the New Reno drug lords. Oh, and they have some strange spokespeople with shiny teeth.
In Elder Scrolls 4, I learned about the Mythic Dawn and the cults of Dagon. You can count on them to have wine. Or at least potions of magicka.
I'm not defending Gnome in any way. Personally I've always found their defaults and UI design non-intuitive. However, one of the things I've always believed is that "ease of use" is more subjective than we imagine. People new to the Linux desktop may find it counter-intuitive compared to the Windows desktop they've used for years.
But imagine if we were blank slates with no pre-conceived notions of how a desktop should behave?
For example, when I sort things in a desk drawer, I don't put my pens near my printer because they both start with the same letter or they both put images on paper. I put labels on my DVDs and MiniDV tapes and I label the items themselves, not the box where I put them in. In short, I mix all types of media. The current desktop metaphor completely breaks this free-form approach that many of use have. I don't think it's a technical barrier; just that people are used to doing things a certain way.
So, though I don't agree with Gnome decisions I do give them credit for trying to do new things (as difficult and bizarre as those decisions can be).
There are tools that can do a decent job of packaging some modules. For example, using the CPAN2RPM tool you can create a SPEC file. The SPEC file can then contain a Requires and Provides section for generating dependency lists. These lists can contain version information such as a requirement that a package be within a particular version range. Frontend tools such as yum can then use these dependency lists to pull in appropriate modules contained in RPMs. But yeah, it won't (automatically) solve the bizarre and arbitrary versioning schemes of some modules, but it can be manually worked around by adjusting the RPM version versus the Perl module version.
Vista was bad at release. It got a lot better by the time Windows 7 became available for sale, but Vista was not a product that a multi-billion dollar corporation should have released in such a state. For the cost of Vista, and the billions that Microsoft and the PC industry stood to make on the product, it shouldn't have had all the flaws. And there were many..
Before it was even released there were problems. Missed schedules, removed features, arguments with OEMs because of resource requirements such as the Vista Basic fiascos (some were Intel's fault, many were Microsoft's).
Even with all the delays, it was still released with little polish. The security sub-system was brain dead to the point that Apple could mock the dialogs that popped up every moment. There's a video on YouTube showing five dlalogs that popped up when a user wanted to delete a file. Networking would fail (google Vista wireless disconnects for thousands of hits). The apologists who claim that the driver errors were the fault of third-party vendors don't say how Microsoft changed and changed things as they neared deadline.
No, Vista certainly wasn't as bad as ME, but that's no excuse to release such a flawed product. When you are a billion dollar company and your software costs $200 a seat, we expect a certain level of quality that we don't from a free download. The fact that the free download works just as well would piss me off to no end if I'd spent $200 on Vista.
It wasn't *that* long ago that executives didn't type their own memos and letters. Ask one to use a typewriter or a word processor and they would have laughed or wouldn't know how to do it.
More and more computing skills are becoming basic skills. Maybe only the dinosaurs continue to use word processors and spreadsheets, but people still want wikis and PDFs. And by dinosaurs I don't mean the old schoolers, but those who still cling to the idea that in this age, the best way to disseminate knowledge is to print it on an 8" x 11", un-editable, fixed document stuck in a binder...
And that's part of the problem. In my day to day work I don't need a word processor or a spreadsheet except when a manager specifically asks for documentation in that format. So I gather my data and run it through a utility to convert it to a pretty Excel sheet, or convert it to a nicely formatted PDF, or make it into a web page. We're teaching kids to use tools that don't work all that well for the media-rich environment we have today.
Teach them to write a Facebook app or use a content creation tool.. That will be more useful than learning how to print mail merged letters.
The reason GM needed to get bailed out by the government is because they ignored the evidence of every other country on earth and presumed US gas prices would always stay the same.
Hehe.. if they had put that much thought into it I'd surprised. As late as the end of 2008, a GM spokesperson was still saying at a car show that the American consumer doesn't care about gas prices and that the SUV and big truck would continue to sell well. I don't know what his full reasoning was -- maybe he assumed that the people who bought very large trucks and SUVs *needed* those vehicles so would buy them regardless of gas prices -- but the short of it is that even when other manufacturers were at the very least hedging their bets about big trucks/SUVs by having one or two vehicles with better fuel efficiency (or at least not a big truck), GM was still barreling (haha) on with a 2002 mindset.
They're just trying to be more precise. Doing so incentivizes brand awareness action-takers with post-current paradigms and forward-looking product models. A mere "re-design" would incorporate less-than-best-practice message exposure methodologies whereas a "re-architect" or architecture secondary optimization message distribution implies ground-up re-envisioning.
Victim of its own success (sorta)
on
A Requiem For Saab
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
SAAB was once quirky and bizarre, the choice of folks who needed some particular features. Then people started buying it, not for the suitability for cold weather or whatever, but precisely because it was quirky. Then the customers even stopped caring about the quirkiness and started buying them for the nameplate. Sure, there were a few folks who needed some strange features, but for the most part, people only cared about the name. GM, though not having the brightest business acumen, sought to capitalize. Instead of quirkiness they sold the brand on its name. Alas, in circles of people who cared about these things, GM and exclusivity are mutually - ahh - exclusive. The cars stopped selling.
There's a right way and a wrong way to capitalize on quirkiness, I think. Apple used to sell their products as the choice of the minority. Their "Think Different" campaign was not so much about suitability but about the mere fact of being different than the masses. That campaign might not have worked a few years later when nationalism and homogenized thinking was seen as patriotic, but it was perfect for the times.
So here was GM peddling SAAB as the choice of the oddball right during the time when it was gauche to be different. Then when that failed they started talking about SAAB's roots in a foreign military when US patriotism was near a peak. I suppose if they had survived, GM would have marketed it as the choice of banking executives. "Look! SAAB is the number one choice among failed banking executives!"
Don't knock ease of use, or the influx of new users that will make Linux a force in the industry. It's called progress; maybe you should check it out sometime.
I dunno. I enjoy the fact that many people are using Linux.. It helps for many things. But sometimes it's like a good fishing hole. If you have a great spot you might tell one person (or better yet, blindfold them as you drive them there). But once you start inviting people in, pretty soon you have a major interstate and boat ramps and a Don's Tackle Shop and a Starbucks right alongside your nice fishing hole. And instead of people asking you about the merits of hand tied fishing lures or whether hand-made aluminum can shiners are better than factory you start getting people bragging about their RV and powerboats and complaining about having to bait their own hooks.
All said, it's better that there are more people using Linux, but I guess I'm nostalgic for those times when a 5 node compute cluster was something pretty cool.
It's easy enough to disable, but everytime a doc gets loaded with embedded JS, the reader will prompt to enable it with a message saying something like "the document may not display correctly" without it enabled. Clicking the "yes" will then re-enable it. The problem with this approach is that we get so many warnings that people may automatically start enabling JS accidentally.
Re:Isn't everyone like just using KVM?
on
The Book of Xen
·
· Score: 1
RedHat is supporting Xen for the lifetime of the RHEL5 spin, which is at least a couple years from now. I think you have until 2014 until they stop supporting Xen.
I was skeptical of the move to KVM but I think it's a good technology. It has some very interesting features that Xen does not, including KSM (kernel same-page merging) and better memory balooning. Plus it makes much better sense from a support standpoint. Xen is owned, at the top, from a proprietary company (Cisco). It was only recently (Oct 2009) that it was completely opened up (GPL). But the fact that KVM is in the mainline kernel means that it's easier to support on RedHat kernels, and that alone may make it worthwhile.
As to the vt/amd-v requirements, yeah, that's needed. The number of systems without chip-level virtualization is falling though.
I admin AIX systems for my day job... One thing that's really nice about AIX is that the filesystem and underlying block device is highly integrated. This means that to resize a volume you can run a single command that does it on the fly. For AIX admins who are new to Linux it seems a step backwards and they liken it to HP-UX or some earlier volume management...
Ahh, but the beauty of having separate filesystem and block device is that it's so damn flexible. I can build an LVM volume group on iSCSI LUNs exported from a another system. In that VG I can create a set of LUNs that I can use for the basis of my DRBD volume. In that DRBD volume I can carve out other disks. Or I can multipath them. Or create a software RAID.
Anyhoo, DRBD is a really cool technology. It gives the ability to create HA pairs on the cheap. You can put anything from a shared apache docroot there to the disks for Oracle RAC. With fast networking available for cheap, almost any shop can have the toys that were once only affordable to big companies...
Your point, though I suspect facetious, is quite interesting. I also envision a future where we can harness biological resources to produce energy. The mammalian brain produces megawatts of power over its lifetime. Imagine if we could take advantage of that? In envision a future where hundreds, perhaps thousands, if not millions or biological entities are connected in vast grids to power the world of the future. We could feed these batteries just as we feed chickens and pigs today; namely, just recycle the used organic matter as feed to the living bio entities. It would be a complete closed system producing gigawatts of power.
I agree mostly, but I think that big studios still have a purpose. I enjoy independent films, but there are also certain types of films that cannot easily be completed by a smaller studio. I.e., films with cutting-edge CGI or larger scale. In order to sell a film to millions they make it inoffensive which often means boring. Or they get a big name actor. Or they load it up with CGI. Then they end up with a movie that's interesting in a "Mind's Eye" type of way, but forgettable otherwise.
The other reason is that, though there are some very good independent film makers, there are LOADS and LOADS of horrible ones. They may be self-financed which can mean that they want the final product to be awesome.... or they make some unwatchable drivel to satisfy an artistic urge.
IMHO the big studios should invest more in smaller budget films and independent film makers. They do this already, but it seems that many studios stake their financial well-being on one or two blockbusters a year.
And also, tend to be much more compatible : they simply accept good-old PostScript.
Some do.. most don't.
I have an HP LaserJet 2600n which uses something that's not quite the HP page description language and not PS. To use it in Linux requires downloading third-party drivers and building them. As of today none of the major distributions supports it with the packaged drivers (CUPS, gimp-print, etc..). It partially works on MacOS, but printing across subnets doesn't work. It mostly works on Windows XP/Vista/7, but drivers for 64-bit Vista/7 took months to appear.
I run/ran a very small consulting company (3 employees including me). The rates are based on SLAs. We respond to calls during business hours, but are available with a 6 hour SLA for non-business hours. If a problem requires immediate response, we charge per incident. This cost keeps expectations in line. If we didn't charge then the customers would call for everything. We do factor in the on-call hours when we price the contracts and have a rotation. The subscription cost is not for the support, but for the right to get support.
I'd also suggest getting a netbook/3G card so you're not confined to your house when you're on call.
At my 9 to 5 it's a little different. We have a duty phone rotation so we're on call one week then off for two. We also have a support desk that fields the minor issues. SLAs for non-production and production systems are a must. Without SLAs people will call at 2AM for the stupidest reasons. Your pay should be in line with the expectations.
If you are the only support person for a business critical application then if it goes down you will get called so maybe it's time to either re-negotiate or train a secondary.
Slashdot Mirror
A bigger problem for Microsoft is that businesses are finding the entire office suite software to be limiting, outdated, and expensive. Have you tried using Word, Excel or PowerPoint to create web content? Sure, you can export and tie in to other tools and databases, but the page centric approach of these tools is different from what people are beginning to prefer. Now everyone wants content that is readable on a mobile device or via feed.
Even in a traditional office setting the requirement for documentation is being replaced by Wiki. Sure, there's something to be said for printed manuals, but many places are finding it easier to store their documentation (especially fast changing ones) in an online tool that can auto-create paged documentation. Spreadsheets? Yes, I still have managers requesting documentation in a spreadsheet format, even if I store it in a wiki or in an automated tool. E.g., I use a monitoring tool that provides up-to-the-second information on hardware and software but some managers still prefer a static Excel spreadsheet. But that's changing because even the dinosaurs have to answer to the higher ups when it comes to cutting needless work (well, at least I can hope). And Powerpoint? Slides and business meetings seem to go hand in hand. Maybe the sales folks will continue to use it. Except when I get a request to specifically put it in PowerPoint, I'll either just bring up the web page live or use a PDF.
You fail. Obviously you haven't worked in other large companies. In many companies besides UPS the term "internal customers" is used to differentiate external customers from the people running the business.
Google next time before posting.
When I worked front-line IT support for UPS back in the 90s, I had to wear dress slacks and a tie. If I was visiting customers I had to wear a suit. This would not be a big deal if the customers worked in offices, but for the most part they worked in the shipping department which was usually in the warehouse which was usually the hottest and dustiest place in the building. Even for internal customers it was a pain. A UPS shipping facility is filthy. There's dust, dirt, grime and it's not air-conditioned. A lot times I was crawling under carts, going up in ceilings to trace cabling, Wearing dress clothes in this environment sucked. Not only did I get filthy almost every day, but my clothes didn't last very long at all.
And I had to walk uphill across conveyor belts to and from school.
I hated the Microsoft ads for the same reason I hate a bunch of other computer ads... they are patronizing. Somewhere some marketer read some demographic data that says that some celebrity is watched by a target audience. The marketer decides to create an ad based on this celebrity endorsement. The ad content doesn't matter, but the marketer believes that because they brought in that celebrity the target demographic will like the product.
They do this when creating ads, movies, television shows; the idea being that the content doesn't really matter as long as they get the scenery correct.
Listen to a concept band recently? It's the same idea. There's an ensemble cast of a Thinker, a Rebel, a Button Down Guy, an Outcast. Every one is chosen not on their talent, but on their appeal to a target demographic.
The Hansel and Gretel story, even in its modern incarnation, seems the wrong message: Two juveniles wander around the forest unsupervised. They vandalize then enter the house of an elderly woman. When the woman catches them and locks them up in preparation for calling the proper authorities (or the parents), the kids break out and murder the woman by pushing her into the fire.
Listen to the feeds directly...
I bookmark the NASA feeds directly in VLC on Linux so I can play them without a browser opened. To do so, open the following in VLC or your media player:
http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/isslivestream.asx
http://www.nasa.gov/178952main_Mission_Audio_UP.asx
I actually have the players embedded into my desktop which has lots of blinken lights, wireframe space animations and krellm monitors on an Apollo background.
As far back as I can remember, religion and gaming go hand in hand. For example, if you prayed in Nethack, you could be gifted with potions of healing. Or if you sacrificed a fresh kill at an altar, you may gain favor with your god. But don't sacrifice your puppy because someone may get upset.
In Fallout 2 I learned that Hubologists are a great source of grenades. They keep to themselves except when they're out warring with the New Reno drug lords. Oh, and they have some strange spokespeople with shiny teeth.
In Elder Scrolls 4, I learned about the Mythic Dawn and the cults of Dagon. You can count on them to have wine. Or at least potions of magicka.
So I wouldn't say it's a fringe thing.
I'm not defending Gnome in any way. Personally I've always found their defaults and UI design non-intuitive. However, one of the things I've always believed is that "ease of use" is more subjective than we imagine. People new to the Linux desktop may find it counter-intuitive compared to the Windows desktop they've used for years.
But imagine if we were blank slates with no pre-conceived notions of how a desktop should behave?
For example, when I sort things in a desk drawer, I don't put my pens near my printer because they both start with the same letter or they both put images on paper. I put labels on my DVDs and MiniDV tapes and I label the items themselves, not the box where I put them in. In short, I mix all types of media. The current desktop metaphor completely breaks this free-form approach that many of use have. I don't think it's a technical barrier; just that people are used to doing things a certain way.
So, though I don't agree with Gnome decisions I do give them credit for trying to do new things (as difficult and bizarre as those decisions can be).
There are tools that can do a decent job of packaging some modules. For example, using the CPAN2RPM tool you can create a SPEC file. The SPEC file can then contain a Requires and Provides section for generating dependency lists. These lists can contain version information such as a requirement that a package be within a particular version range. Frontend tools such as yum can then use these dependency lists to pull in appropriate modules contained in RPMs. But yeah, it won't (automatically) solve the bizarre and arbitrary versioning schemes of some modules, but it can be manually worked around by adjusting the RPM version versus the Perl module version.
This is revisionist history.
Vista was bad at release. It got a lot better by the time Windows 7 became available for sale, but Vista was not a product that a multi-billion dollar corporation should have released in such a state. For the cost of Vista, and the billions that Microsoft and the PC industry stood to make on the product, it shouldn't have had all the flaws. And there were many..
Before it was even released there were problems. Missed schedules, removed features, arguments with OEMs because of resource requirements such as the Vista Basic fiascos (some were Intel's fault, many were Microsoft's).
Even with all the delays, it was still released with little polish. The security sub-system was brain dead to the point that Apple could mock the dialogs that popped up every moment. There's a video on YouTube showing five dlalogs that popped up when a user wanted to delete a file. Networking would fail (google Vista wireless disconnects for thousands of hits). The apologists who claim that the driver errors were the fault of third-party vendors don't say how Microsoft changed and changed things as they neared deadline.
No, Vista certainly wasn't as bad as ME, but that's no excuse to release such a flawed product. When you are a billion dollar company and your software costs $200 a seat, we expect a certain level of quality that we don't from a free download. The fact that the free download works just as well would piss me off to no end if I'd spent $200 on Vista.
It wasn't *that* long ago that executives didn't type their own memos and letters. Ask one to use a typewriter or a word processor and they would have laughed or wouldn't know how to do it.
More and more computing skills are becoming basic skills. Maybe only the dinosaurs continue to use word processors and spreadsheets, but people still want wikis and PDFs. And by dinosaurs I don't mean the old schoolers, but those who still cling to the idea that in this age, the best way to disseminate knowledge is to print it on an 8" x 11", un-editable, fixed document stuck in a binder...
And that's part of the problem. In my day to day work I don't need a word processor or a spreadsheet except when a manager specifically asks for documentation in that format. So I gather my data and run it through a utility to convert it to a pretty Excel sheet, or convert it to a nicely formatted PDF, or make it into a web page. We're teaching kids to use tools that don't work all that well for the media-rich environment we have today.
Teach them to write a Facebook app or use a content creation tool.. That will be more useful than learning how to print mail merged letters.
Likewise, I have a soft spot for the land-line and the command line
You damn young'uns and your interactive shells. Sheesh.
The reason GM needed to get bailed out by the government is because they ignored the evidence of every other country on earth and presumed US gas prices would always stay the same.
Hehe.. if they had put that much thought into it I'd surprised. As late as the end of 2008, a GM spokesperson was still saying at a car show that the American consumer doesn't care about gas prices and that the SUV and big truck would continue to sell well. I don't know what his full reasoning was -- maybe he assumed that the people who bought very large trucks and SUVs *needed* those vehicles so would buy them regardless of gas prices -- but the short of it is that even when other manufacturers were at the very least hedging their bets about big trucks/SUVs by having one or two vehicles with better fuel efficiency (or at least not a big truck), GM was still barreling (haha) on with a 2002 mindset.
They're just trying to be more precise. Doing so incentivizes brand awareness action-takers with post-current paradigms and forward-looking product models. A mere "re-design" would incorporate less-than-best-practice message exposure methodologies whereas a "re-architect" or architecture secondary optimization message distribution implies ground-up re-envisioning.
SAAB was once quirky and bizarre, the choice of folks who needed some particular features. Then people started buying it, not for the suitability for cold weather or whatever, but precisely because it was quirky. Then the customers even stopped caring about the quirkiness and started buying them for the nameplate. Sure, there were a few folks who needed some strange features, but for the most part, people only cared about the name. GM, though not having the brightest business acumen, sought to capitalize. Instead of quirkiness they sold the brand on its name. Alas, in circles of people who cared about these things, GM and exclusivity are mutually - ahh - exclusive. The cars stopped selling.
There's a right way and a wrong way to capitalize on quirkiness, I think. Apple used to sell their products as the choice of the minority. Their "Think Different" campaign was not so much about suitability but about the mere fact of being different than the masses. That campaign might not have worked a few years later when nationalism and homogenized thinking was seen as patriotic, but it was perfect for the times.
So here was GM peddling SAAB as the choice of the oddball right during the time when it was gauche to be different. Then when that failed they started talking about SAAB's roots in a foreign military when US patriotism was near a peak. I suppose if they had survived, GM would have marketed it as the choice of banking executives. "Look! SAAB is the number one choice among failed banking executives!"
Don't knock ease of use, or the influx of new users that will make Linux a force in the industry. It's called progress; maybe you should check it out sometime.
I dunno. I enjoy the fact that many people are using Linux.. It helps for many things. But sometimes it's like a good fishing hole. If you have a great spot you might tell one person (or better yet, blindfold them as you drive them there). But once you start inviting people in, pretty soon you have a major interstate and boat ramps and a Don's Tackle Shop and a Starbucks right alongside your nice fishing hole. And instead of people asking you about the merits of hand tied fishing lures or whether hand-made aluminum can shiners are better than factory you start getting people bragging about their RV and powerboats and complaining about having to bait their own hooks.
All said, it's better that there are more people using Linux, but I guess I'm nostalgic for those times when a 5 node compute cluster was something pretty cool.
Onions on a belt. My hovercraft is full of eels. Watch out for spotted cats. It's probably some in thing. I never understand them either.
It's easy enough to disable, but everytime a doc gets loaded with embedded JS, the reader will prompt to enable it with a message saying something like "the document may not display correctly" without it enabled. Clicking the "yes" will then re-enable it. The problem with this approach is that we get so many warnings that people may automatically start enabling JS accidentally.
RedHat is supporting Xen for the lifetime of the RHEL5 spin, which is at least a couple years from now. I think you have until 2014 until they stop supporting Xen.
I was skeptical of the move to KVM but I think it's a good technology. It has some very interesting features that Xen does not, including KSM (kernel same-page merging) and better memory balooning. Plus it makes much better sense from a support standpoint. Xen is owned, at the top, from a proprietary company (Cisco). It was only recently (Oct 2009) that it was completely opened up (GPL). But the fact that KVM is in the mainline kernel means that it's easier to support on RedHat kernels, and that alone may make it worthwhile.
As to the vt/amd-v requirements, yeah, that's needed. The number of systems without chip-level virtualization is falling though.
I admin AIX systems for my day job... One thing that's really nice about AIX is that the filesystem and underlying block device is highly integrated. This means that to resize a volume you can run a single command that does it on the fly. For AIX admins who are new to Linux it seems a step backwards and they liken it to HP-UX or some earlier volume management...
Ahh, but the beauty of having separate filesystem and block device is that it's so damn flexible. I can build an LVM volume group on iSCSI LUNs exported from a another system. In that VG I can create a set of LUNs that I can use for the basis of my DRBD volume. In that DRBD volume I can carve out other disks. Or I can multipath them. Or create a software RAID.
Anyhoo, DRBD is a really cool technology. It gives the ability to create HA pairs on the cheap. You can put anything from a shared apache docroot there to the disks for Oracle RAC. With fast networking available for cheap, almost any shop can have the toys that were once only affordable to big companies...
Your point, though I suspect facetious, is quite interesting. I also envision a future where we can harness biological resources to produce energy. The mammalian brain produces megawatts of power over its lifetime. Imagine if we could take advantage of that? In envision a future where hundreds, perhaps thousands, if not millions or biological entities are connected in vast grids to power the world of the future. We could feed these batteries just as we feed chickens and pigs today; namely, just recycle the used organic matter as feed to the living bio entities. It would be a complete closed system producing gigawatts of power.
I agree mostly, but I think that big studios still have a purpose. I enjoy independent films, but there are also certain types of films that cannot easily be completed by a smaller studio. I.e., films with cutting-edge CGI or larger scale. In order to sell a film to millions they make it inoffensive which often means boring. Or they get a big name actor. Or they load it up with CGI. Then they end up with a movie that's interesting in a "Mind's Eye" type of way, but forgettable otherwise.
The other reason is that, though there are some very good independent film makers, there are LOADS and LOADS of horrible ones. They may be self-financed which can mean that they want the final product to be awesome.... or they make some unwatchable drivel to satisfy an artistic urge.
IMHO the big studios should invest more in smaller budget films and independent film makers. They do this already, but it seems that many studios stake their financial well-being on one or two blockbusters a year.
And also, tend to be much more compatible : they simply accept good-old PostScript.
Some do.. most don't.
I have an HP LaserJet 2600n which uses something that's not quite the HP page description language and not PS. To use it in Linux requires downloading third-party drivers and building them. As of today none of the major distributions supports it with the packaged drivers (CUPS, gimp-print, etc..). It partially works on MacOS, but printing across subnets doesn't work. It mostly works on Windows XP/Vista/7, but drivers for 64-bit Vista/7 took months to appear.
I run/ran a very small consulting company (3 employees including me). The rates are based on SLAs. We respond to calls during business hours, but are available with a 6 hour SLA for non-business hours. If a problem requires immediate response, we charge per incident. This cost keeps expectations in line. If we didn't charge then the customers would call for everything. We do factor in the on-call hours when we price the contracts and have a rotation. The subscription cost is not for the support, but for the right to get support.
I'd also suggest getting a netbook/3G card so you're not confined to your house when you're on call.
At my 9 to 5 it's a little different. We have a duty phone rotation so we're on call one week then off for two. We also have a support desk that fields the minor issues. SLAs for non-production and production systems are a must. Without SLAs people will call at 2AM for the stupidest reasons. Your pay should be in line with the expectations.
If you are the only support person for a business critical application then if it goes down you will get called so maybe it's time to either re-negotiate or train a secondary.
People call me a tool all the time.