"You know, screw it, time for a change of pace -- lets switch vendors on our database/customer tracking/data mining/image recognition/OCR/whatever solution. I want to spend a couple hundred thousand in transition costs and cause disruptions in our main business to no purpose whatsoever"
Let me tell you what it's like in the real world, using two real world situations I've had to cope with a number of times in my career:
Here's the deal. You've got a ticketing/dispatch system that isn't cutting the mustard, and what's worse, the fine print of the license says that to be in compliance, you need to cut even more functionality, or pay an extra three mill a year. Not even the database schema is available for examination, so you can't jump ship to another vendor, or more reasonably in this day and age, hire a couple of Java geeks and roll your own web app.
Here's the deal II. You've got a mission critical messaging application that can't keep up with demand, pounding the little windows box it's on so hard it keeps falling over. You'd like to put it on one of the big mama-jama Sun Enterprise clusters you've got sitting around with spare capacity. Too bad, the tiny company who licensed it to you had to auction off the sofas in the break room on ebay to meet payroll, and can't really afford to develop a Sun version. Or the megaconglomerate you licensed it from couldn't be bothered to recompile and test on Sun for a single customer.
If it's open source, it's likely someone's already compiled, tested and put it out as a tarball for Solaris10. It's even more likely it's written in a portable language like Java, PHP or Python, using your choice of OSS RDBMS and web server software, making the platform it's deployed upon irrelevant.
Massive changes to infrastructure happen, happen often, and happen for sound business reasons. Closed source applications get in the way of an agile and profit-making IT environment.
As Apple has shown time and again, style is a key objective of engineering in creating a desireable product. Building an aesthetically pleasing cell tower would do an end-run around most (tho by no means all) of the objections.
A huge metal eyesore makes it harder for the product to be deployed. Disguising, blending or beautifying the towers to compliment their surroundings would make them easier to deploy. For example, in New England, many cell towers are hidden atop the towering smokestacks of 18th and 19th century mills (no longer used, but are pleasing brickwork architecture the building owners usually left in place.) They also lease space in tall church steeples... another commodity New England has in abundance.
Where no steeples or smokestacks are available, companies should design a nice cladding that compliments the surroundings.
Hire a real architecht with serious artistic chops to oversee the design and implementation of cell towers, and you spend a lot less money fighting hostile communities. Not hard to figure out.
Weak passwords are a reality. In my current job, I've got eleven different systems that require a password. If you think I'm going to selct and memorize a cryptograhically correct password for each and every one of them every three months when the passwords are set to expire, you're insane.
The more important and sensitive systems get strong passwords. The web-based tool I use to diagnore hardware issues in equipment that isn't even online? It gets something easy to remember.
For non-technical users, the situation is worse. If you get too psychotic in your password policies, they're just going to write them down on a post-it they stick to the underside of their mousepad if they're bing circumspect, and right to the monitor if they're not.
If you're dumb enough to run a system so braindamaged that it allows brute-force attacks and so insecure that running a decrypt on a password file gives the bad guys the keys to your palace, you need a strong password policy. You will also deserve to be mocked when a soceng hack allows someone into the building to look closely at any monitors bearing post-it notes.
Password security is the last refuge of the incompetent sysadmin or web developer. Careful separation of user roles and discouraging escalation of priveleges is more important than someone using gpe~9u?bi4 as their password for this week.
C# is unsuitable for serious research, as it is designed to compete with Java for enterprise applications, not systems or interface programming. It is a very specialized tool best suited for running databse intensive applications with very little UI that isn't part of Microsoft's standard widget library.
Java is the language that the majority of comp sci programs use to teach programming these days, and it is very, very good as a general purpose programming language. Its abilities and limitations are well understood and documented in books and scholarly papers, and the number of useful third party libraries, both commercial and OSS, is staggering.
Python would be an interesting choice, too, depending on how much horsepower your UI concepts require. If you're thinking of a photorealistic immersive 3D environment, pick something else. Like fortran on a Cray. But for novel approaches to GUI or command line interaction, check out pygame, the Python libraries designed for game development.
Actually, check out all of the game development systems out there. A GUI and a Game are both a way of interacting with a computer using visual and aural feedback, after all...
The Business Class cablemodem accounts with Cox Communications are cut off if their security systems catch suspicious activity (DDOS packets, worm traffic, etc.) or open relays on your network connection. They're very polite about it, explain the problem and how to get it fixed. Their security department's not open after hours, either, so you're horked if you figure this out after midnight.
Haven't had to deal with their nice security people myself (No Windows or Linux or Sendmail here!), but I've laughed at colleagues who have. Mostly the same people who believe a $70/month cablemodem or DSL connection can replace their $800/month fiber line for serious webhosting enterprises.
There are definite economic advantages to open borders with friendly countries. If you don't need a passport to go from London to Latvia via France, Germany and Poland, I don't understand why you'd need one to go from Seattle to Vancouver and back again. (And if you say it's because there's no international terrorism in Europe, I'm going to laugh at you until I barf on your loafers.)
It's designed to slaughter the tourist economy of Montreal, Niagra Falls and Vancouver, and as an economic sanction against the "blue" states who do the most business with Canada - Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, New York, Illinois, Michigan and Washington.
What used to be a pleasant weekend getaway to Niagra now requires monts of advanced planning if you don't already have a passport. Scratch that... with Bush-era budget cuts and exponential demand stemming from needing one to get into and out of Canada, it will take years to get your passport. It will only be slightly less painful than getting a greencard.
Which kills all international tourism. Which helps put up that Berlin Wall.
"So sorry about not being able to attend that conference in Stockholm, Mr. Evolutionary Biologist, but you should have planned ahead and got your passport application in to us three years ago. All this backlog from businessmen desparate to be able to get to clients north of the border, you see. Oh, and you've been mysteriously flagged as a terrorist, which will double the amount of time it takes a passport application to clear. No, we won't tell you why you were flagged or what you need to do to get un-flagged, because the law says we don't have to, you godless scum."
It's an enormous deal, and if you can't see it, it's only becuase you were lied to: it's not "just" tightening up the paperwork. It's closing the longest open border in the world, because Liberal Democracies are the enemy. We cannot be allowed to experience what a truly free nation is like after ours stops being free. With this new passport nonsense, it's =already= less free.
This is reflecting the new political reality that the current Administration and the ruling party in congress considers left-leaning first world nations as ideological enemies to be isolated and opposed on the global stage. It's a clear sign that the US considers open access to Canada and Canadian culture as being counterproductive to their ideals in reshaping America to the Dickensian nightmare of theocracy and plutocracy.
This isn't a security issue. This is an issue of punishing America's closest allies for following a different political destiny. It's to protect Michiganders and New Hampshirites from being exposed to affordable healthcare, gay rights and decrinminalized marijuana.
Don't think it's true? Look at the ruthless, relentless and sometimes threatening and bellicose criticism of Europe by the right-wing blogosphere, professional pundits, and administration officials like Rumsfeldt. Canada is culturally closer to Europe at this point than the US... and the US will be punishing them for that at every opportunity.
It's a new Berlin wall, to discourage cultural contamination. I can think of nothing more heartbreaking.
Hey, they're just in time to have their guts ripped out by IP telephony and software PBX's that run on cheap commodity computers, just like the rest of the market!
Cisco and Nortel, at least, have enormous markets in optical data circuit stuff and TCP/IP routing equipment to fall back on.
I help to run "one of those" sites, the nature and scope of which I will leave entirely to the reader's imagination, save to say it's unlikely people hit it from work.
Over the course of the past three months, I'm seeing closer to 30% of my traffic as being Mozilla based, with Firefox accounting for almost all of that. 60% is IE, and the rest is split between Opera, Safari, Konqueror and various spider bots. Oddly enough, Opera is better represented than Safari... I attribute this to its popularity on cell phones.
Speaking with other admins, these numbers aren't unique.
IE's lost its monopoly in the home browser market... its overall dominance comes from locked-down corporate desktops, where change comes but slow.
Sure, if you're the Wall Street Journal. Otherwise, for general news, you're competing against a hundred thousand other news organs. I'm sure they'd all be better off going to a paid subscription model. The problem is, who goes first? That lucky pioneer will see their online subscriber base worse than decimated, and the return on the ad revenue of their advertisers shrink to negligibility, leading to advertiser defections.
So, to the first paper who takes that bold step towards pay-only, good luck. You're gonna need a lot of it...
I was flamed to hell and gone on the OpenBSD mailing lists a few years back for saying the same things she did. I realized that OpenBSD was best used as a server OS rather than a general purpose workstation OS, and indicated there were areas that needed a lot of work to bring it into line with what the typical sys-admin or web developer needed. (My biggest gripe, then as now, is the lack of a decent SMP implementation across all the platforms they claim to support.)
I was branded a troll, and consigned to the bit-bucket of everyone who mattered on the lists. They told me, simply, "DIY or STFU."
I can really see their point - they don't do this for money, they do this because it's fun and intellectually challenging. They weren't interested in SMP applications as much as they were interested in other areas of OS development and "freeing" essential parts of the infrastructure from onerous licensing. (OpenSSH and pf being the most famous examples.)
On the other hand, Theo is famous for clobbering his developers into doing the Right Thing for the project, even if it's just buckling down and doing uninteresting, no-fun grunt work, like writing clear, concise and complete man pages or refactoring the code endlessly for potential bugs as part of his fabled "code auditing."
Listening to the end users, even if they aren't coders themselves, is an "Eat Your Vegetables" part of being a grown up. As such, it's violently resisted by hackers who'd rather you just take the code and fork it if you have a problem, and sneer at you if you don't have the technical chops to pull it off. I can appreciate that... they did a lot of hard work for something they love. They don't need to hear some ingrate who can't sling code telling them their work isn't good enough.
On the other hand, OpenBSD is only now bothering to get their SMP implementation to work when we're less than a year away from all processors becomming multi-core, and multi-processor systems as common as rain. Are they really better off for ignoring the lamer, non-coding end users? How much corporate sponsorship have they given up because they had no interest in supporting features corporations use?
As a counter-example, Postgres has always been very responsive to their userbase. It's an insanely useful program few people ever take issue with, and is deployed in big business as well as home hobbyist applications.
This is entiurely true, and they will quietly go with whatever is the least expensive and time-consuming. Now they can burn a Blue-Ray master with the tools they've been using all along - Final Cut Pro and DVD Studio Pro. The Mac has an enormous presence in the videography field, and not needing to buy or train on special software, apart from the usual upgrade to the tools they're already using.
So, whether Hollywood likes it or not, Apple's just won the fight for Blue Ray... unless they get tricky, and simultaneously support HD-TV as well, which isn't beyond the realm of possibility.
This is the end of the telco. A self-organizing internet of WiFi, once adopted on a massive scale, will obviate the need for the last mile provider. In all the states without protective legislation, municipalities will have one or two huge pipes for the wider municipal network to plug into, say at the Library and Town Hall, and let everyone's 802.11s hardware negotiate with each other the best path to it.
The places that do have protective legislation will find themselves repealing it in the face of enormous public pressure.
The only purpose of the telco will be to provide fiber for institutional and corporate clients concerned with security and guaranteed bandwidth.
The Outbound Rollerbar is one of my favorite pointing devices of all time. It worked surprisingly well, allowing a full fledged pointing device that felt sturdy and offered definite tactile advantages over the "marble" rollerballs and "trackpoints" of the time, in a truly tiny space.
A trackbar would make a phenomenal pointing device for a PDA or smartphone... full mouse movement in something that takes up about as much space as a typical cell phone rocker switch.
Not certain how I'd feel about spending big bucks on it as a ketyboard add-on, tho. A folding bluetooth keyboard with one built in? Squee!
Warning: I administered most of those machines at one point or another.
Me, too. I miss them.
I can now commit more science in less time for less money than ever before
Well, duh. Of course you can. That's the nature of Moore's Law.
The thing of it is, the Opteron is only now outpacing old architectures long since put into maintenance mode. You're not able to commit as much science in as little time as you could with true high performance platforms.
That's the whole point in a nutshell... the market cannot sufficiently innovate with only competition between two processors on a single platform, no matter how many OS's it runs.
Now for the nitpicks:
Itanium... is a good replacement for most of those processors, but thanks to Intel/HP's inept marketing, it's going to be the Alpha of the 21st century.
Thanks to it's unworkable inception, unrealistic claims, stupid-long time-to-market, ludicrous price, massive power requirements and smelt-iron heat production, too. Intel killed the i960 and i860 with gross marketing incopetence, but at least those chips had some real benefits to offer. The Itanium barely keeps up with the Alpha and Fujitsu SPARC chips, while being far more difficult to implement in a workable system....The perennial dog Sparc "we have a balanced architecture; all of our components are equally slow!"
Sparc isn't the best choice for number crunching, but it does a lot of other things very well, most notably its low latency and graceful degredation under heavy loads. Very useful for server work, where chewing up and spitting bits out over IO as fast as possible is more important than raw horsepower. Never understood why it was so popular as a technical workstation, tho.
Was it high performance? x86 outperforms all of your examples on a per-CPU basis.
This is a recent phenomenon, and has more to do with the politics of monopoly and inept business strategy.
In their heydey, MiPS, Alpha and PA-RISC were neck-and-neck in terms of performance, because all were funded and developed by vibrant companies at the top of their game. Sun was slower, especially in the benchmarks, but had other advantages (like its unreal low-latency).
Then along came Rick Belluzzo, who set both HP and SGI on the Itanium/WindowsNT deathmarch, killing off R&D for all three of the top-tier RISC/Unix architectures... once HP bought Compaq, they destroyed the old DEC R&D machine, and the Alpha with it, mostly out of spite.
What would have happened if HP hadn't decided to burn its bridges for Itanium? What would have happened if SGI had hired a CEO who decided to keep them on the RISC/Unix track and to keep Mips rather than spin it off?
You would see a top teir of premium processors, and a second tier of processors x86 could almost compete with. The way it was in '97, before "Merced" and "NT" were going to be the future of technical computing.
Was it incredible graphics? These geezers don't have access to modern gpus.
Modern SGI workstations, while laboring under an antiquated processor, have GPU subsystems you gamerboys can only have fond wet-dreams about.
Even still, past history shows that with a viable high-performance oriented platform, high performance innovation takes place that takes a few years to filter down to the commodity platforms: SCSI, Fiberchannel, crossbar connections for subsystems, wide datapath expansion cards (DEC's 64bit PCI comes immediately to mind), and GPU subsystems like anything from SGI or HP's Visualize.
Commodity gear has caught up, only because of Moore's law. The vendors essentially gave up their cutting-edge workstation and server markets to push their commodity systems, thinking they would offer higher margins and a wider customer base.
Instead, Dell took everything, slashing margins and eroding everyone else's share of the x86 pie.
Now Sun is making the same mistakes.
Understandable, though, as their SPARC R&D has been a complete mess. The Fujitsu SPARC chips are kinda sexy, but getting long in the tooth.
Opteron is a last-gasp stopmeasure for Sun. It will probably do little except irritate their longterm Solaris/SPARC customers.
This isn't a triumph. It's a travesty. It's a dangerous thinness, the latest symptom of a mass extinction that will take computing a long time to recover from, if it ever does.
If this trend continues, you will only have the option of running your choice of OSS Unix or Windows on x86. There is no future for any other sort of chip... now that Sun's all but given up, all that's left is IBM making chips for Apple and the biggest of the big iron. Even Palm and ARM is winking out, one licensee at a time...
If you're about to invent a better way to do computing on the desktop or in the server room, don't bother. The barriers to entry are now insurmountable.
Welcome to the new Wintel world. Linux is just a way of making the monopoly feel like something else, except to those of us who remember a time when real workstations and servers stomped the earth with fire and fury... SGI Indigos, DEC Alphastations, HP Superdomes, Siemens Pyramid, Fujitsu 64's. Now it's all gone. Just x86 forever and ever, Amen.
Those who have never used anything but PC's, and the glorified PC's that pass for workstation and servers, in their personal and professional life will never understand the frightening emptiness out there. Maybe that's just progress and commoditization for you, the dinosaurs dying off... but evolution does not guarantee progress. Neither do market pressures.
It's interesting to note that almost everything we find weird and wonderful about computers, and about the culture that builds, modifies and programs computers for the sheer love of intellectual challenge, stems from the MIT Model Railroad Club.
The hackers who loved switches, relays, automation systems and doing beyond-tomorrow stuff with all of it irritated the hell out of the guys who liked collecting little models of trains, and eventually went on to be the Midnight Hackers of fame.
Have you seen one barrier-busting, run-the-competition-out-of-business application from the OSS crowd yet? Me neither. If MySQL and Postgres are so good, why aren't Informix and Sybase out of business, nevermind Oracle?
What's more, most software development consists of one-off applications engineered for a specific purpose, either for in-house IT projects, or developed by a consulting firm for the IT projects of companies who don't want to carew and feed their own code monkies.
Utter horseshit. While not everyone can get to work for a Cygwin or OSDL, a savy OSS programmer will eventually pick up the skills needed to participate in large, complex projects. This is resume fodder of the highest order. Those who are project initiators or maintainers will get to apply for jobs like "Architect" and be taken seriously. It's a way of ganing experience without having any experience... and experience means more money and seniority when landing a new job.
The tech is pretty cool, but I wonder if all they're doing with it is calculating modern-day epicycles.
If the calculations are correct, then Dark Matter accounts for more mass than any single element in the universe, and has and is reacted on by gravity. There should be some of it close by to take a look at... there should be a good deal of it here on earth, as both earth and dark matter have gravity.
I half-suspect that both dark energy and dark matter are unexpected aspects of gravity working are cosmic scales, but I don't understand the deep geek physics enough to really comment apart from the obvious:
The existance of something so prevalent should be easily proven by direct observation. It hasn't.
This is a bit like Cher announcing her Final Farewell Tour three years after her Very Last, I Really Mean It This Time Farewell Tour. Or the CdC announcing they've disbanded. Believe it when I don't see it.
The "Save Hubble!" cry is originating largely from a population that just loves those cool-looking pictures that they can use as desktop backgrounds or screen savers.
You mean astronomers?
Hubble has done more groundbreaking science than any other single astronomical instrument. It's only pretty desktops if you don't have a degree in astrophysics... otherwise it's hard data, and lots of it.
The current administration is decidedly anti-science, because that plays well with his Fundamentalist Christian supporters, and because pure-science researchers tend to be academicians, and therefore left-leaning.
This is punishing Science and those who practice it for their political leanings, their stance on climate change, stem cell research and any number of other fields of study that offend or confuse those in positions of influence with the administration.
And the libertarians are opposed to any government involvement in the sciences, and they tend to be staunch GOP supporters, so he'll throw them the bone of gutting NASA while picking their pocket for overseas adventurism and corporate subsidies.
Slashdot Mirror
"You know, screw it, time for a change of pace -- lets switch vendors on our database/customer tracking/data mining/image recognition/OCR/whatever solution. I want to spend a couple hundred thousand in transition costs and cause disruptions in our main business to no purpose whatsoever"
Let me tell you what it's like in the real world, using two real world situations I've had to cope with a number of times in my career:
Here's the deal. You've got a ticketing/dispatch system that isn't cutting the mustard, and what's worse, the fine print of the license says that to be in compliance, you need to cut even more functionality, or pay an extra three mill a year. Not even the database schema is available for examination, so you can't jump ship to another vendor, or more reasonably in this day and age, hire a couple of Java geeks and roll your own web app.
Here's the deal II. You've got a mission critical messaging application that can't keep up with demand, pounding the little windows box it's on so hard it keeps falling over. You'd like to put it on one of the big mama-jama Sun Enterprise clusters you've got sitting around with spare capacity. Too bad, the tiny company who licensed it to you had to auction off the sofas in the break room on ebay to meet payroll, and can't really afford to develop a Sun version. Or the megaconglomerate you licensed it from couldn't be bothered to recompile and test on Sun for a single customer.
If it's open source, it's likely someone's already compiled, tested and put it out as a tarball for Solaris10. It's even more likely it's written in a portable language like Java, PHP or Python, using your choice of OSS RDBMS and web server software, making the platform it's deployed upon irrelevant.
Massive changes to infrastructure happen, happen often, and happen for sound business reasons. Closed source applications get in the way of an agile and profit-making IT environment.
SoupIsGood Food
As Apple has shown time and again, style is a key objective of engineering in creating a desireable product. Building an aesthetically pleasing cell tower would do an end-run around most (tho by no means all) of the objections.
A huge metal eyesore makes it harder for the product to be deployed. Disguising, blending or beautifying the towers to compliment their surroundings would make them easier to deploy. For example, in New England, many cell towers are hidden atop the towering smokestacks of 18th and 19th century mills (no longer used, but are pleasing brickwork architecture the building owners usually left in place.) They also lease space in tall church steeples... another commodity New England has in abundance.
Where no steeples or smokestacks are available, companies should design a nice cladding that compliments the surroundings.
Hire a real architecht with serious artistic chops to oversee the design and implementation of cell towers, and you spend a lot less money fighting hostile communities. Not hard to figure out.
SoupIsGood Food
Weak passwords are a reality. In my current job, I've got eleven different systems that require a password. If you think I'm going to selct and memorize a cryptograhically correct password for each and every one of them every three months when the passwords are set to expire, you're insane.
The more important and sensitive systems get strong passwords. The web-based tool I use to diagnore hardware issues in equipment that isn't even online? It gets something easy to remember.
For non-technical users, the situation is worse. If you get too psychotic in your password policies, they're just going to write them down on a post-it they stick to the underside of their mousepad if they're bing circumspect, and right to the monitor if they're not.
If you're dumb enough to run a system so braindamaged that it allows brute-force attacks and so insecure that running a decrypt on a password file gives the bad guys the keys to your palace, you need a strong password policy. You will also deserve to be mocked when a soceng hack allows someone into the building to look closely at any monitors bearing post-it notes.
Password security is the last refuge of the incompetent sysadmin or web developer. Careful separation of user roles and discouraging escalation of priveleges is more important than someone using gpe~9u?bi4 as their password for this week.
SoupIsGood Food
This just in! Microsoft downplays competitor's achievement with a promise of better functionality in a vaporware product! Film at 11!
SoupIsGood Food
C# is unsuitable for serious research, as it is designed to compete with Java for enterprise applications, not systems or interface programming. It is a very specialized tool best suited for running databse intensive applications with very little UI that isn't part of Microsoft's standard widget library.
Java is the language that the majority of comp sci programs use to teach programming these days, and it is very, very good as a general purpose programming language. Its abilities and limitations are well understood and documented in books and scholarly papers, and the number of useful third party libraries, both commercial and OSS, is staggering.
Python would be an interesting choice, too, depending on how much horsepower your UI concepts require. If you're thinking of a photorealistic immersive 3D environment, pick something else. Like fortran on a Cray. But for novel approaches to GUI or command line interaction, check out pygame, the Python libraries designed for game development.
Actually, check out all of the game development systems out there. A GUI and a Game are both a way of interacting with a computer using visual and aural feedback, after all...
SoupIsGood Food
The Business Class cablemodem accounts with Cox Communications are cut off if their security systems catch suspicious activity (DDOS packets, worm traffic, etc.) or open relays on your network connection. They're very polite about it, explain the problem and how to get it fixed. Their security department's not open after hours, either, so you're horked if you figure this out after midnight.
Haven't had to deal with their nice security people myself (No Windows or Linux or Sendmail here!), but I've laughed at colleagues who have. Mostly the same people who believe a $70/month cablemodem or DSL connection can replace their $800/month fiber line for serious webhosting enterprises.
SoupIsGood Food
There are definite economic advantages to open borders with friendly countries. If you don't need a passport to go from London to Latvia via France, Germany and Poland, I don't understand why you'd need one to go from Seattle to Vancouver and back again. (And if you say it's because there's no international terrorism in Europe, I'm going to laugh at you until I barf on your loafers.)
:p )
It's designed to slaughter the tourist economy of Montreal, Niagra Falls and Vancouver, and as an economic sanction against the "blue" states who do the most business with Canada - Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, New York, Illinois, Michigan and Washington.
What used to be a pleasant weekend getaway to Niagra now requires monts of advanced planning if you don't already have a passport. Scratch that... with Bush-era budget cuts and exponential demand stemming from needing one to get into and out of Canada, it will take years to get your passport. It will only be slightly less painful than getting a greencard.
Which kills all international tourism. Which helps put up that Berlin Wall.
"So sorry about not being able to attend that conference in Stockholm, Mr. Evolutionary Biologist, but you should have planned ahead and got your passport application in to us three years ago. All this backlog from businessmen desparate to be able to get to clients north of the border, you see. Oh, and you've been mysteriously flagged as a terrorist, which will double the amount of time it takes a passport application to clear. No, we won't tell you why you were flagged or what you need to do to get un-flagged, because the law says we don't have to, you godless scum."
It's an enormous deal, and if you can't see it, it's only becuase you were lied to: it's not "just" tightening up the paperwork. It's closing the longest open border in the world, because Liberal Democracies are the enemy. We cannot be allowed to experience what a truly free nation is like after ours stops being free. With this new passport nonsense, it's =already= less free.
SoupIsGood Food
(n00b. Check my UID.
This is reflecting the new political reality that the current Administration and the ruling party in congress considers left-leaning first world nations as ideological enemies to be isolated and opposed on the global stage. It's a clear sign that the US considers open access to Canada and Canadian culture as being counterproductive to their ideals in reshaping America to the Dickensian nightmare of theocracy and plutocracy.
This isn't a security issue. This is an issue of punishing America's closest allies for following a different political destiny. It's to protect Michiganders and New Hampshirites from being exposed to affordable healthcare, gay rights and decrinminalized marijuana.
Don't think it's true? Look at the ruthless, relentless and sometimes threatening and bellicose criticism of Europe by the right-wing blogosphere, professional pundits, and administration officials like Rumsfeldt. Canada is culturally closer to Europe at this point than the US... and the US will be punishing them for that at every opportunity.
It's a new Berlin wall, to discourage cultural contamination. I can think of nothing more heartbreaking.
SoupIsGood Food
Hey, they're just in time to have their guts ripped out by IP telephony and software PBX's that run on cheap commodity computers, just like the rest of the market!
Cisco and Nortel, at least, have enormous markets in optical data circuit stuff and TCP/IP routing equipment to fall back on.
SoupIsGood Food
I help to run "one of those" sites, the nature and scope of which I will leave entirely to the reader's imagination, save to say it's unlikely people hit it from work.
Over the course of the past three months, I'm seeing closer to 30% of my traffic as being Mozilla based, with Firefox accounting for almost all of that. 60% is IE, and the rest is split between Opera, Safari, Konqueror and various spider bots. Oddly enough, Opera is better represented than Safari... I attribute this to its popularity on cell phones.
Speaking with other admins, these numbers aren't unique.
IE's lost its monopoly in the home browser market... its overall dominance comes from locked-down corporate desktops, where change comes but slow.
SoupIsGood Food
Sure, if you're the Wall Street Journal. Otherwise, for general news, you're competing against a hundred thousand other news organs. I'm sure they'd all be better off going to a paid subscription model. The problem is, who goes first? That lucky pioneer will see their online subscriber base worse than decimated, and the return on the ad revenue of their advertisers shrink to negligibility, leading to advertiser defections.
So, to the first paper who takes that bold step towards pay-only, good luck. You're gonna need a lot of it...
SoupIsGood Food
I was flamed to hell and gone on the OpenBSD mailing lists a few years back for saying the same things she did. I realized that OpenBSD was best used as a server OS rather than a general purpose workstation OS, and indicated there were areas that needed a lot of work to bring it into line with what the typical sys-admin or web developer needed. (My biggest gripe, then as now, is the lack of a decent SMP implementation across all the platforms they claim to support.)
I was branded a troll, and consigned to the bit-bucket of everyone who mattered on the lists. They told me, simply, "DIY or STFU."
I can really see their point - they don't do this for money, they do this because it's fun and intellectually challenging. They weren't interested in SMP applications as much as they were interested in other areas of OS development and "freeing" essential parts of the infrastructure from onerous licensing. (OpenSSH and pf being the most famous examples.)
On the other hand, Theo is famous for clobbering his developers into doing the Right Thing for the project, even if it's just buckling down and doing uninteresting, no-fun grunt work, like writing clear, concise and complete man pages or refactoring the code endlessly for potential bugs as part of his fabled "code auditing."
Listening to the end users, even if they aren't coders themselves, is an "Eat Your Vegetables" part of being a grown up. As such, it's violently resisted by hackers who'd rather you just take the code and fork it if you have a problem, and sneer at you if you don't have the technical chops to pull it off. I can appreciate that... they did a lot of hard work for something they love. They don't need to hear some ingrate who can't sling code telling them their work isn't good enough.
On the other hand, OpenBSD is only now bothering to get their SMP implementation to work when we're less than a year away from all processors becomming multi-core, and multi-processor systems as common as rain. Are they really better off for ignoring the lamer, non-coding end users? How much corporate sponsorship have they given up because they had no interest in supporting features corporations use?
As a counter-example, Postgres has always been very responsive to their userbase. It's an insanely useful program few people ever take issue with, and is deployed in big business as well as home hobbyist applications.
SoupIsGood Food
This is entiurely true, and they will quietly go with whatever is the least expensive and time-consuming. Now they can burn a Blue-Ray master with the tools they've been using all along - Final Cut Pro and DVD Studio Pro. The Mac has an enormous presence in the videography field, and not needing to buy or train on special software, apart from the usual upgrade to the tools they're already using.
So, whether Hollywood likes it or not, Apple's just won the fight for Blue Ray... unless they get tricky, and simultaneously support HD-TV as well, which isn't beyond the realm of possibility.
SoupIsGood Food
This is the end of the telco. A self-organizing internet of WiFi, once adopted on a massive scale, will obviate the need for the last mile provider. In all the states without protective legislation, municipalities will have one or two huge pipes for the wider municipal network to plug into, say at the Library and Town Hall, and let everyone's 802.11s hardware negotiate with each other the best path to it.
The places that do have protective legislation will find themselves repealing it in the face of enormous public pressure.
The only purpose of the telco will be to provide fiber for institutional and corporate clients concerned with security and guaranteed bandwidth.
Good riddance.
SoupIsGood Food
The Outbound Rollerbar is one of my favorite pointing devices of all time. It worked surprisingly well, allowing a full fledged pointing device that felt sturdy and offered definite tactile advantages over the "marble" rollerballs and "trackpoints" of the time, in a truly tiny space.
A trackbar would make a phenomenal pointing device for a PDA or smartphone... full mouse movement in something that takes up about as much space as a typical cell phone rocker switch.
Not certain how I'd feel about spending big bucks on it as a ketyboard add-on, tho. A folding bluetooth keyboard with one built in? Squee!
SoupIsGood Food
Warning: I administered most of those machines at one point or another.
...The perennial dog Sparc "we have a balanced architecture; all of our components are equally slow!"
Me, too. I miss them.
I can now commit more science in less time for less money than ever before
Well, duh. Of course you can. That's the nature of Moore's Law.
The thing of it is, the Opteron is only now outpacing old architectures long since put into maintenance mode. You're not able to commit as much science in as little time as you could with true high performance platforms.
That's the whole point in a nutshell... the market cannot sufficiently innovate with only competition between two processors on a single platform, no matter how many OS's it runs.
Now for the nitpicks:
Itanium... is a good replacement for most of those processors, but thanks to Intel/HP's inept marketing, it's going to be the Alpha of the 21st century.
Thanks to it's unworkable inception, unrealistic claims, stupid-long time-to-market, ludicrous price, massive power requirements and smelt-iron heat production, too. Intel killed the i960 and i860 with gross marketing incopetence, but at least those chips had some real benefits to offer. The Itanium barely keeps up with the Alpha and Fujitsu SPARC chips, while being far more difficult to implement in a workable system.
Sparc isn't the best choice for number crunching, but it does a lot of other things very well, most notably its low latency and graceful degredation under heavy loads. Very useful for server work, where chewing up and spitting bits out over IO as fast as possible is more important than raw horsepower. Never understood why it was so popular as a technical workstation, tho.
SoupIsGood Food
Was it high performance? x86 outperforms all of your examples on a per-CPU basis.
This is a recent phenomenon, and has more to do with the politics of monopoly and inept business strategy.
In their heydey, MiPS, Alpha and PA-RISC were neck-and-neck in terms of performance, because all were funded and developed by vibrant companies at the top of their game. Sun was slower, especially in the benchmarks, but had other advantages (like its unreal low-latency).
Then along came Rick Belluzzo, who set both HP and SGI on the Itanium/WindowsNT deathmarch, killing off R&D for all three of the top-tier RISC/Unix architectures... once HP bought Compaq, they destroyed the old DEC R&D machine, and the Alpha with it, mostly out of spite.
What would have happened if HP hadn't decided to burn its bridges for Itanium? What would have happened if SGI had hired a CEO who decided to keep them on the RISC/Unix track and to keep Mips rather than spin it off?
You would see a top teir of premium processors, and a second tier of processors x86 could almost compete with. The way it was in '97, before "Merced" and "NT" were going to be the future of technical computing.
Was it incredible graphics? These geezers don't have access to modern gpus.
Modern SGI workstations, while laboring under an antiquated processor, have GPU subsystems you gamerboys can only have fond wet-dreams about.
Even still, past history shows that with a viable high-performance oriented platform, high performance innovation takes place that takes a few years to filter down to the commodity platforms: SCSI, Fiberchannel, crossbar connections for subsystems, wide datapath expansion cards (DEC's 64bit PCI comes immediately to mind), and GPU subsystems like anything from SGI or HP's Visualize.
Commodity gear has caught up, only because of Moore's law. The vendors essentially gave up their cutting-edge workstation and server markets to push their commodity systems, thinking they would offer higher margins and a wider customer base.
Instead, Dell took everything, slashing margins and eroding everyone else's share of the x86 pie.
Now Sun is making the same mistakes.
Understandable, though, as their SPARC R&D has been a complete mess. The Fujitsu SPARC chips are kinda sexy, but getting long in the tooth.
Opteron is a last-gasp stopmeasure for Sun. It will probably do little except irritate their longterm Solaris/SPARC customers.
SoupIsGood Food
This isn't a triumph. It's a travesty. It's a dangerous thinness, the latest symptom of a mass extinction that will take computing a long time to recover from, if it ever does.
If this trend continues, you will only have the option of running your choice of OSS Unix or Windows on x86. There is no future for any other sort of chip... now that Sun's all but given up, all that's left is IBM making chips for Apple and the biggest of the big iron. Even Palm and ARM is winking out, one licensee at a time...
If you're about to invent a better way to do computing on the desktop or in the server room, don't bother. The barriers to entry are now insurmountable.
Welcome to the new Wintel world. Linux is just a way of making the monopoly feel like something else, except to those of us who remember a time when real workstations and servers stomped the earth with fire and fury... SGI Indigos, DEC Alphastations, HP Superdomes, Siemens Pyramid, Fujitsu 64's. Now it's all gone. Just x86 forever and ever, Amen.
Those who have never used anything but PC's, and the glorified PC's that pass for workstation and servers, in their personal and professional life will never understand the frightening emptiness out there. Maybe that's just progress and commoditization for you, the dinosaurs dying off... but evolution does not guarantee progress. Neither do market pressures.
SoupIsGood Food
It's interesting to note that almost everything we find weird and wonderful about computers, and about the culture that builds, modifies and programs computers for the sheer love of intellectual challenge, stems from the MIT Model Railroad Club.
The hackers who loved switches, relays, automation systems and doing beyond-tomorrow stuff with all of it irritated the hell out of the guys who liked collecting little models of trains, and eventually went on to be the Midnight Hackers of fame.
SoupIsGood Food
Have you seen one barrier-busting, run-the-competition-out-of-business application from the OSS crowd yet? Me neither. If MySQL and Postgres are so good, why aren't Informix and Sybase out of business, nevermind Oracle?
What's more, most software development consists of one-off applications engineered for a specific purpose, either for in-house IT projects, or developed by a consulting firm for the IT projects of companies who don't want to carew and feed their own code monkies.
That kinda work ain't going away in a hurry.
SoupIsGood Food
Utter horseshit. While not everyone can get to work for a Cygwin or OSDL, a savy OSS programmer will eventually pick up the skills needed to participate in large, complex projects. This is resume fodder of the highest order. Those who are project initiators or maintainers will get to apply for jobs like "Architect" and be taken seriously. It's a way of ganing experience without having any experience... and experience means more money and seniority when landing a new job.
SoupIsGood Food
The tech is pretty cool, but I wonder if all they're doing with it is calculating modern-day epicycles.
If the calculations are correct, then Dark Matter accounts for more mass than any single element in the universe, and has and is reacted on by gravity. There should be some of it close by to take a look at... there should be a good deal of it here on earth, as both earth and dark matter have gravity.
I half-suspect that both dark energy and dark matter are unexpected aspects of gravity working are cosmic scales, but I don't understand the deep geek physics enough to really comment apart from the obvious:
The existance of something so prevalent should be easily proven by direct observation. It hasn't.
SoupIsGood Food
This is a bit like Cher announcing her Final Farewell Tour three years after her Very Last, I Really Mean It This Time Farewell Tour. Or the CdC announcing they've disbanded. Believe it when I don't see it.
SoupIsGood Food
The "Save Hubble!" cry is originating largely from a population that just loves those cool-looking pictures that they can use as desktop backgrounds or screen savers.
You mean astronomers?
Hubble has done more groundbreaking science than any other single astronomical instrument. It's only pretty desktops if you don't have a degree in astrophysics... otherwise it's hard data, and lots of it.
The current administration is decidedly anti-science, because that plays well with his Fundamentalist Christian supporters, and because pure-science researchers tend to be academicians, and therefore left-leaning.
This is punishing Science and those who practice it for their political leanings, their stance on climate change, stem cell research and any number of other fields of study that offend or confuse those in positions of influence with the administration.
And the libertarians are opposed to any government involvement in the sciences, and they tend to be staunch GOP supporters, so he'll throw them the bone of gutting NASA while picking their pocket for overseas adventurism and corporate subsidies.
SoupIsGood Food
Why someone doesn't just slap an open-standard VPN server onto the base station is byond me. Solves a bazillion problems all at once.
SoupIsGood Food