Face it. The problem isn't the money machines that the major parties use. It's US.
I disagree, the current campaign finance rules have a lot to do with it. There *is* something that we the voters can do though! The root of the corruption problem is that it is now worth it for a representative to "sell" their vote. The reasons this have come to pass are many and varied. Some have to do with "us" the voters and some don't.
The key to solving this problem is to make it not worth selling votes. To do this you need to attack on 2 fonts, you need to make it benefit less to sell a vote and cost more.
Prong 1: Benefit less
Candidates need money to get votes. When candidates are starved for money, the one with the most money wins. When candidates have enough money to really get their message across to the people, the better candidate wins. The key to making money less important is to let the candidates have more of it. This seems counter-intuitive but it makes sense and there is lots of evidence to back it up. If you know about what kind of person a candidate is and you don't like them, you won't vote for them no matter how much money they spend.
For some reason people keep insisting that reducing the amount of money a candidate can get is the solution to this problem. It just doesn't make sense. A candidate that has enough money to get his message out isn't vulnerable to being bought whereas a candidate that *needs* your money is a candidate you can buy. Most of the laws I've heard people suggest to solve this issue would simply make it worse. Candidates would need money more desperately and be more vulnerable to outside influence. When the trial lawyers association calls up with 1,000 members who have all written checks and are just waiting for your vote before they send them, and the politician needs that money, you bet they'll cave. The easier you make it for the candidates to get money, the weaker the strings get on each donation.
The start of this mess was the horrible Supreme Court ruling to fight "the appearance of corruption" and putting the arbitrary $1,000 limit on campaign donations. That was an unfortunate decision on the part of the Supreme Court and it has traded the appearance of corruption for the real thing, legal vote selling that's deeply embedded in our political system now. The result is that now we have an election before every election and only the rich are invited to vote. It's a money election and unless you get significant support, you can't be a candidate. This seems to have hurt democrats more since republicans tend to have larger numbers of people who donate smaller amounts and democrats tend to have smaller numbers of ultra-wealthy idealists who donate lots of money. Conspiracy theorists can run wild as to whether that was intentional. Recently, the independent add campaigns like moveon.org have undone this tipping of the scales possibly reversing it since $1,000 doesn't go as far as it used to. It's time to do away with this rule that was so strangely enacted. That would do a lot towards reducing the benefit of selling votes.
Prong 2: Cost more
Reducing the strength of the strings attached to contributions is a start but to really break the current system of vote selling we need to start watching our politicians and make it cost them votes when they do it. If it looses them more votes than the money gains them, they won't do it. This means when your senator votes for the DMCA and receives a few thousand dollars from media interests, it should show up in elections. The challenger should be able to stand on a podium and say "My opponent is corrupt. Here's what they did!" and have people listen. This is a tough problem but it could be solved without changing any laws, although the current systems make it hard.
What we need is an organization that monitors politicians and compares their funding sources with their policy decisions. If a politician votes for something that isn't in their consti
If I were going to do it I'd build it my own by combining a nice case and a 12 port 3Ware controller with whatever server configuration and SATA drives I wanted to get.
I love mod_perl, I've been programming in it for years too and it's still my preferred devlopment environment. That said, it sucks! I use Registry to do my programming in and it's namespace is horribly polluted, and applications don't behave as you would expect them to. It's hard to setup right and almost impossible to maintain with multiple programmers. An error in one application can wreak havoc in others (try spawning a thread and watch the destructors for all objects every other program has open be run.)
Mod_perl is a minefield. If you can avoid all the pitfalls and issues, it's a great platform, probably the best platform, it's just too hard for new programmers to get involved in. That's why, unfortunately, PHP has taken most of mod_perl's market share away. I think most PHP programmers would prefer perl if they had started with it, but since they didn't, they ended up learning PHP and being limited by it's narrow focus.
Java programs suck. Server side web-based apps are OK but anything client side has always sucked. Java wants to be an OS, not just a language and it makes it suck as a language. It should compile to natively executable self contained redistributable programs that don't need 12 megs of crap just to run. Also, Java's speed sucks. It's probably because it uses memory so horribly inneficiently.
Perl is out of favor now. I think it's mostly bad luck and age. Mod_Perl turned out to be a horribly difficult environment to program in and PHP pulled most of it's market away. It has no good gui toolkit (Perl/TK is horribly ugly) and nobody but sysadmin's use command line programs anymore. Perl 5 is also very old and it's language looks strange and dated to most programmers (-> instead of . What's that all about!)
That said, the language is designed with a lot of good principles that are missing from both Java and Python. I think Perl has a lot of ground to make up, we'll see if they do it once the Perl 6 beast is unleashed.
I realise you're desperate to draw a parallel with 3DFX somewhere
I'm not desperate, I don't really care one way or another. I don't work for either company nor am I invested in them other than owning their product and I have a lot more NVidia cards than ATI.
More programmability is not just a gimmick, it's where real-time graphics is heading.
While it may be the future, what makes companies money is now and I think NVidia in in a bad position right now. NVidia's advancements are slowing to the point where their lead has evaporated and they have to resort to the desperate measure of making unwieldy expensive products to keep the performance crown. While I'm sure NVidia has the technical potential to bring their product advancement back up to speed, usually when issues like this start creeping in, it's because bad management is choking innovation and I've never seen that dislodged successfully. Bad management covers their asses and rides a failing company for all it's worth.
OTOH, ATi has completely failed to innovate over the last 3 years. Every revision since the 9700 has been effectively just a speed increase. Their latest cards give basically nothing new in terms of features over the 9700 pro. In terms of capability, their latest cards are inferior to nvidia's FX cards.
If you remember, the same could be said for 3Dfx for a while. Motion blur and all that amazing new stuff that was in the newer Voodoo's was supposed to dramatically improve the gaiming experience. It didn't. What dramatically improved the gaming experience was fill rate. A simple engine that could render like mad was better for gaming than the complicated engine that could do all kinds of things you didn't need. ATI is following the same path that NVidia once followed to great success. 3Dfx was vocal about how owners of NVidia cards would be left out in the cold when new games came out that supported the new features. Nobody cared. The games looked better and played better NOW. That's what mattered.
Maybe ATI is falling behind in some technology but they are leading at the most important one fill rate/watt. If NVidia doesn't get off their butts and start working on that again, they're cooked.
This is the exact mistake 3Dfx made. They weren't a video card, they were a "gaming platform". They wanted people to see them like they saw playstation. They went with a proprietary interface (GLide), didn't see the need to provide 2D capabilites (which sucked for OEM's) and even went so far as to supply an external power supply with their cards. They started fixing all that and just trying to make a good 3D video card eventually but they never made it.
NVidia apparently ended up dying because managment refused to put out a card that wasn't better than the competition even though they were running out of money and nobody was buying their old products. NVidia did a little of that with their last two series cards. They need to stop trying to win through marketing partnering and driver tweaks and go back to trying to win through superior chip design.
If a codepath were written for the X800 series of cards, I'm sure the scores would be closer to each other.
Even if that never happens, I won't even consider purchasing any of the current GeForce 6800 series. NVidia has fallen into the trap that killed 3Dfx of forgetting that their products are a small part of a multi-purpose computer.
You can pretty much throw a 9800 or X800 series card into any machine and get a really good gaming machine. With the new cards in the GeForce series you have expensive requirements like massive power supplies extra slots, high-end cooling, and you need to not mind the dustbuster sound coming from your machine. All those extras add to the cost of building a system with the card and the real market for video cards isn't $500 upgrade cards, it's OEM's. NVidia's high end cards suck because of the expense and inconvenience they add to the machine and their middle end cards just simply suck.
ATI is winning, by a lot more than benchmarks indicate. I think NVidia kept too many of the 3Dfx people, they are starting to stink of death. They need a new, more power efficient and transistor efficient design but instead they work on supid things like bringing back SLI. I've been a fan of NVidia since the days of the Riva 128 and the first TNT. Back then they were mopping up the mid-high range with simple cards that were much more OEM friendly than 3Dfx's although slightly slower. Now NVidia is positioning itself in the difficult, obtrusive ultra-high end space where 3Dfx was when it died. Let's hope they change course before it's too late.
Just read a quote and remembered this discussion. Figured I'd add it in:
A number of years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court dealt with a man named Dowling, who sold "pirated" Elvis Presley recordings, and was prosecuted for the Interstate Transportation of Stolen Property. The [Supreme Court] did not condone his actions, but did make it clear that it was not "theft" -- but technically "infringement" of the copyright of the Presley estate, and therefore copyright law, and not anti-theft statutes, had to be invoked.
Despite the copyright holder's wailing to the contrary, copying songs in the US is not stealing and not theft it's infringement. There is a difference in the eyes of the law, and there is a real practical logical difference in the real world.
Replying to sig's is dumb but I'm going to do it anyway.
Fellow Americans - vote this fall. I don't care who you vote for, but if you don't vote you aren't allowed to complain.
Don't vote unless you understand the issues. People voting because they think they should, end up voting for bad candidates who can quickly make a good impression. If you aren't willing to spend the time to understand who and what you are voting for, don't vote! It removes all substance from politics.
Theft means that your "victim" starts out having something, and ends up not having it anymore.
Exactly!
With shoplifting the victim loses two things:
1. Property of value
2. A potential customer for that property
With copying, the victim only loses the potential customer. These are not the same thing. They never have been the same thing. They never will be the same thing no matter how many times the RIAA/MPAA tries to claim they are.
Losing a potential customer is not the same as having something stolen from you. Also, since with copying, the potential customer doesn't actually own what they have a copy of, they are still a potential customer, just a less-likely one. In all the "we lost this much money" arguments the industry groups put out do you think they factor in how many people converted from unlicensed versions to paying for licensed ones?
Also, if you can gain ethernet communications with a machine you can hack it. Even if you implement security at onther level (i.e. using a VPN over the wireless link) someone can hack into your machine and gain access to your machine and to the VPN through it. Security of wireless networks is quite important.
What happens when the CEO deletes his stack of porn off the file server? Your RAID-5 isn't going to help you one damn bit. And maybe your company doesn't have the bandwidth to move the 100+GB of data on the fileserver to an offsite backup.
Wow. Some people just don't understand how to use harddrives as a backup medium. If you can use a tape, you can use a harddrive. If you can't figure out how, that's your problem. The properties aren't exactly the same but they are similar. Of course, since harddrives provide farely rapid random access they open other, more efficient oportunities but you can still use them like tape.
Because the techonology and techniques are all recently developed. Just because something is old, doesn't mean it's not monumentally complicated. Much of the US's most amazing engineering happened from the 40's through the 60's. Much of what we do now is simple by comparison.
People love to hate the laptop. It's huge, heavy, a pain to travel with, and here to stay.
There are lots of reasons this concept wont work. Security, compatibility, terminal and bandwidth availability are all issues with this approach. Each year laptops get significantly lighter, faster, cheaper and more popular. I heard a statistic recently that it's that soon (possibly happened already) more computers purchased will be laptops than desktops. The price premium for a laptop vs. other options is becoming smaller and as their capabilities expand, much easier to justify.
To illustrate this, my in-laws house is a very old farmhouse. Their is no computer, no keyboards or monitors, no internet connection and barely any electrical system however just a few days ago I was playing lan games with my nieces and nephews there. I have 2 laptops with wireless cards built in and using them I can have a 2 computer office/gaming environment with networking that fits in one bag I can sling over my shoulder. This is awesome, not "laughable".
I can do software development, work on presentations, compose messages all without any infrastructure at all. I can work or play in a field, on a train, in an car, on a bus, or in an airplane half way across the pacific. That's the power of the modern laptop and no web-based app can come close to that. Think about what infrastructure would be needed to make all those places have access to this service and how many companies would have to be involved and taking a cut. Bus companies, car manufacturers, airlines, satellite internet providers, cellular data networks, not to mention farmers with fields. The massive effort it would take to even come close to the capabilities of a laptop is mind-boggling.
There will always be a place for web-based applications and a place for non-web based applications. This concept will probably be appropriate for some content creation and collaboration purposes but I think it's utility is small and the idea of carrying a laptop won't be laughable any decade soon.
what is your data worth? that is where you need to start and then look at the 10-30% of the data's value to start looking at how must to spend on it's storage.
This is bogus. Storage companies use this to convince people to spend too much money. To illustrate the point: if your data is worth about $20K (however you measure that) and there is a storage solution that costs $15k that is good and one that costs $2K that is better in every way for what you need to do, you should go with the $2k. Companies often use the "You get what you pay for" argument to convince people to buy expensive storage solutions. Sometimes, what you pay for ends up being an inferior poorly designed system created with expensive proprietary components.
I'm not suggesting people buy el-cheapo rickety storage solutions, just be smart about your purchase and realize there are companies out their who will charge you big bucks for a mediocre solution when it's not necessarily appropriate. Look at what your needs are and chose from solutions that will meet them.
I'm a big fan of IDE RAID. A standard tactic storage companies used when they had no products that could compete against it is "You get what you pay for." Of course, that's not true and the smart customers knew it which is why those same storage companies have since introduced products based on IDE RAID.
Isn't this exactly what he current fix is doing? I checked my registry after applying the fix and that key listed on that page seems to have been added.
They could so easily have just gone the "all SMTP traffic must go to our hosts" route, but they're doing it the right way instead. Nice to see.
Absolutely! I have a mail server sitting on my Comcast account and I send and receive with it. It would have been a major pain if they blocked all SMTP traffic since they probably wouldn't relay my mail for the addresses on my domain. I would have had to route mail through another machine on another port which is a horrible solution. Eventually I'd end up having to change ISP's which would be quite painful.
Kudo's for making an effort to not break email for those of us who don't use their email system.
Slashdot Mirror
Face it. The problem isn't the money machines that the major parties use. It's US.
I disagree, the current campaign finance rules have a lot to do with it. There *is* something that we the voters can do though! The root of the corruption problem is that it is now worth it for a representative to "sell" their vote. The reasons this have come to pass are many and varied. Some have to do with "us" the voters and some don't.
The key to solving this problem is to make it not worth selling votes. To do this you need to attack on 2 fonts, you need to make it benefit less to sell a vote and cost more.
Prong 1: Benefit less
Candidates need money to get votes. When candidates are starved for money, the one with the most money wins. When candidates have enough money to really get their message across to the people, the better candidate wins. The key to making money less important is to let the candidates have more of it. This seems counter-intuitive but it makes sense and there is lots of evidence to back it up. If you know about what kind of person a candidate is and you don't like them, you won't vote for them no matter how much money they spend.
For some reason people keep insisting that reducing the amount of money a candidate can get is the solution to this problem. It just doesn't make sense. A candidate that has enough money to get his message out isn't vulnerable to being bought whereas a candidate that *needs* your money is a candidate you can buy. Most of the laws I've heard people suggest to solve this issue would simply make it worse. Candidates would need money more desperately and be more vulnerable to outside influence. When the trial lawyers association calls up with 1,000 members who have all written checks and are just waiting for your vote before they send them, and the politician needs that money, you bet they'll cave. The easier you make it for the candidates to get money, the weaker the strings get on each donation.
The start of this mess was the horrible Supreme Court ruling to fight "the appearance of corruption" and putting the arbitrary $1,000 limit on campaign donations. That was an unfortunate decision on the part of the Supreme Court and it has traded the appearance of corruption for the real thing, legal vote selling that's deeply embedded in our political system now. The result is that now we have an election before every election and only the rich are invited to vote. It's a money election and unless you get significant support, you can't be a candidate. This seems to have hurt democrats more since republicans tend to have larger numbers of people who donate smaller amounts and democrats tend to have smaller numbers of ultra-wealthy idealists who donate lots of money. Conspiracy theorists can run wild as to whether that was intentional. Recently, the independent add campaigns like moveon.org have undone this tipping of the scales possibly reversing it since $1,000 doesn't go as far as it used to. It's time to do away with this rule that was so strangely enacted. That would do a lot towards reducing the benefit of selling votes.
Prong 2: Cost more
Reducing the strength of the strings attached to contributions is a start but to really break the current system of vote selling we need to start watching our politicians and make it cost them votes when they do it. If it looses them more votes than the money gains them, they won't do it. This means when your senator votes for the DMCA and receives a few thousand dollars from media interests, it should show up in elections. The challenger should be able to stand on a podium and say "My opponent is corrupt. Here's what they did!" and have people listen. This is a tough problem but it could be solved without changing any laws, although the current systems make it hard.
What we need is an organization that monitors politicians and compares their funding sources with their policy decisions. If a politician votes for something that isn't in their consti
Promise has a nice off-the-shelf solution and you can get it for arround $3600.
If I were going to do it I'd build it my own by combining a nice case and a 12 port 3Ware controller with whatever server configuration and SATA drives I wanted to get.
I love mod_perl, I've been programming in it for years too and it's still my preferred devlopment environment. That said, it sucks! I use Registry to do my programming in and it's namespace is horribly polluted, and applications don't behave as you would expect them to. It's hard to setup right and almost impossible to maintain with multiple programmers. An error in one application can wreak havoc in others (try spawning a thread and watch the destructors for all objects every other program has open be run.)
Mod_perl is a minefield. If you can avoid all the pitfalls and issues, it's a great platform, probably the best platform, it's just too hard for new programmers to get involved in. That's why, unfortunately, PHP has taken most of mod_perl's market share away. I think most PHP programmers would prefer perl if they had started with it, but since they didn't, they ended up learning PHP and being limited by it's narrow focus.
Java programs suck. Server side web-based apps are OK but anything client side has always sucked. Java wants to be an OS, not just a language and it makes it suck as a language. It should compile to natively executable self contained redistributable programs that don't need 12 megs of crap just to run. Also, Java's speed sucks. It's probably because it uses memory so horribly inneficiently.
Perl is out of favor now. I think it's mostly bad luck and age. Mod_Perl turned out to be a horribly difficult environment to program
in and PHP pulled most of it's market away. It has no good gui toolkit (Perl/TK is horribly ugly) and nobody but sysadmin's use command line programs anymore. Perl 5 is also very old and it's language looks strange and dated to most programmers (-> instead of . What's that all about!)
That said, the language is designed with a lot of good principles that are missing from both Java and Python. I think Perl has a lot of ground to make up, we'll see if they do it once the Perl 6 beast is unleashed.
Sweet! I didn't know that was out.
I have two machines that will get that soon.
Ever heard of far cry? Doom 3? Halflife 2? Hell, even Neverwinter Nights used shaders to some extent.
All those games work fine on a top-of-the-line ATI card and I don't have to buy a new power supply to use it.
I realise you're desperate to draw a parallel with 3DFX somewhere
I'm not desperate, I don't really care one way or another. I don't work for either company nor am I invested in them other than owning their product and I have a lot more NVidia cards than ATI.
More programmability is not just a gimmick, it's where real-time graphics is heading.
While it may be the future, what makes companies money is now and I think NVidia in in a bad position right now. NVidia's advancements are slowing to the point where their lead has evaporated and they have to resort to the desperate measure of making unwieldy expensive products to keep the performance crown. While I'm sure NVidia has the technical potential to bring their product advancement back up to speed, usually when issues like this start creeping in, it's because bad management is choking innovation and I've never seen that dislodged successfully. Bad management covers their asses and rides a failing company for all it's worth.
Both ATI and NVidia's Linux drivers suck. NVidia's crash modern kernels and ATI's don't really exist.
Both sides need to open source their drivers or support organizations that develop open sourced drivers for their cards.
Unfortunately, the Linux market is currently finantially unimportant in the 3D graphics card world. Don't look to that to save NVidia from defeat.
and their middle end cards just simply suck.
This is also simply wrong, the 5900XT is the best bang-for-the-buck on the market.
Isn't the FSAA on the 59 series horrible.
Both manufacturers charge way too much for their middle-end cards. We need a third challenger in the pool who can give them a run for their money.
OTOH, ATi has completely failed to innovate over the last 3 years. Every revision since the 9700 has been effectively just a speed increase. Their latest cards give basically nothing new in terms of features over the 9700 pro. In terms of capability, their latest cards are inferior to nvidia's FX cards.
If you remember, the same could be said for 3Dfx for a while. Motion blur and all that amazing new stuff that was in the newer Voodoo's was supposed to dramatically improve the gaiming experience. It didn't. What dramatically improved the gaming experience was fill rate. A simple engine that could render like mad was better for gaming than the complicated engine that could do all kinds of things you didn't need. ATI is following the same path that NVidia once followed to great success. 3Dfx was vocal about how owners of NVidia cards would be left out in the cold when new games came out that supported the new features. Nobody cared. The games looked better and played better NOW. That's what mattered.
Maybe ATI is falling behind in some technology but they are leading at the most important one fill rate/watt. If NVidia doesn't get off their butts and start working on that again, they're cooked.
This is the exact mistake 3Dfx made. They weren't a video card, they were a "gaming platform". They wanted people to see them like they saw playstation. They went with a proprietary interface (GLide), didn't see the need to provide 2D capabilites (which sucked for OEM's) and even went so far as to supply an external power supply with their cards. They started fixing all that and just trying to make a good 3D video card eventually but they never made it.
NVidia apparently ended up dying because managment refused to put out a card that wasn't better than the competition even though they were running out of money and nobody was buying their old products. NVidia did a little of that with their last two series cards. They need to stop trying to win through marketing partnering and driver tweaks and go back to trying to win through superior chip design.
If a codepath were written for the X800 series of cards, I'm sure the scores would be closer to each other.
Even if that never happens, I won't even consider purchasing any of the current GeForce 6800 series. NVidia has fallen into the trap that killed 3Dfx of forgetting that their products are a small part of a multi-purpose computer.
You can pretty much throw a 9800 or X800 series card into any machine and get a really good gaming machine. With the new cards in the GeForce series you have expensive requirements like massive power supplies extra slots, high-end cooling, and you need to not mind the dustbuster sound coming from your machine. All those extras add to the cost of building a system with the card and the real market for video cards isn't $500 upgrade cards, it's OEM's. NVidia's high end cards suck because of the expense and inconvenience they add to the machine and their middle end cards just simply suck.
ATI is winning, by a lot more than benchmarks indicate. I think NVidia kept too many of the 3Dfx people, they are starting to stink of death. They need a new, more power efficient and transistor efficient design but instead they work on supid things like bringing back SLI. I've been a fan of NVidia since the days of the Riva 128 and the first TNT. Back then they were mopping up the mid-high range with simple cards that were much more OEM friendly than 3Dfx's although slightly slower. Now NVidia is positioning itself in the difficult, obtrusive ultra-high end space where 3Dfx was when it died. Let's hope they change course before it's too late.
Despite the copyright holder's wailing to the contrary, copying songs in the US is not stealing and not theft it's infringement. There is a difference in the eyes of the law, and there is a real practical logical difference in the real world.
Replying to sig's is dumb but I'm going to do it anyway.
Fellow Americans - vote this fall. I don't care who you vote for, but if you don't vote you aren't allowed to complain.
Don't vote unless you understand the issues. People voting because they think they should, end up voting for bad candidates who can quickly make a good impression. If you aren't willing to spend the time to understand who and what you are voting for, don't vote! It removes all substance from politics.
Copyright infringement is stealing.
No. It's copyright infringement.
Theft means that your "victim" starts out having something, and ends up not having it anymore.
Exactly!
With shoplifting the victim loses two things:
1. Property of value
2. A potential customer for that property
With copying, the victim only loses the potential customer. These are not the same thing. They never have been the same thing. They never will be the same thing no matter how many times the RIAA/MPAA tries to claim they are.
Losing a potential customer is not the same as having something stolen from you. Also, since with copying, the potential customer doesn't actually own what they have a copy of, they are still a potential customer, just a less-likely one. In all the "we lost this much money" arguments the industry groups put out do you think they factor in how many people converted from unlicensed versions to paying for licensed ones?
Also, if you can gain ethernet communications with a machine you can hack it. Even if you implement security at onther level (i.e. using a VPN over the wireless link) someone can hack into your machine and gain access to your machine and to the VPN through it. Security of wireless networks is quite important.
If you are trusting your backups to hard drives, you will eventually pay the price.
Have you measured the failure rates of your tapes? Tapes are far less reliable than people generally assume they are.
What happens when the CEO deletes his stack of porn off the file server? Your RAID-5 isn't going to help you one damn bit. And maybe your company doesn't have the bandwidth to move the 100+GB of data on the fileserver to an offsite backup.
Wow. Some people just don't understand how to use harddrives as a backup medium. If you can use a tape, you can use a harddrive. If you can't figure out how, that's your problem. The properties aren't exactly the same but they are similar. Of course, since harddrives provide farely rapid random access they open other, more efficient oportunities but you can still use them like tape.
Because the techonology and techniques are all recently developed. Just because something is old, doesn't mean it's not monumentally complicated. Much of the US's most amazing engineering happened from the 40's through the 60's. Much of what we do now is simple by comparison.
People love to hate the laptop. It's huge, heavy, a pain to travel with, and here to stay.
There are lots of reasons this concept wont work. Security, compatibility, terminal and bandwidth availability are all issues with this approach. Each year laptops get significantly lighter, faster, cheaper and more popular. I heard a statistic recently that it's that soon (possibly happened already) more computers purchased will be laptops than desktops. The price premium for a laptop vs. other options is becoming smaller and as their capabilities expand, much easier to justify.
To illustrate this, my in-laws house is a very old farmhouse. Their is no computer, no keyboards or monitors, no internet connection and barely any electrical system however just a few days ago I was playing lan games with my nieces and nephews there. I have 2 laptops with wireless cards built in and using them I can have a 2 computer office/gaming environment with networking that fits in one bag I can sling over my shoulder. This is awesome, not "laughable".
I can do software development, work on presentations, compose messages all without any infrastructure at all. I can work or play in a field, on a train, in an car, on a bus, or in an airplane half way across the pacific. That's the power of the modern laptop and no web-based app can come close to that. Think about what infrastructure would be needed to make all those places have access to this service and how many companies would have to be involved and taking a cut. Bus companies, car manufacturers, airlines, satellite internet providers, cellular data networks, not to mention farmers with fields. The massive effort it would take to even come close to the capabilities of a laptop is mind-boggling.
There will always be a place for web-based applications and a place for non-web based applications. This concept will probably be appropriate for some content creation and collaboration purposes but I think it's utility is small and the idea of carrying a laptop won't be laughable any decade soon.
what is your data worth? that is where you need to start and then look at the 10-30% of the data's value to start looking at how must to spend on it's storage.
This is bogus. Storage companies use this to convince people to spend too much money. To illustrate the point: if your data is worth about $20K (however you measure that) and there is a storage solution that costs $15k that is good and one that costs $2K that is better in every way for what you need to do, you should go with the $2k. Companies often use the "You get what you pay for" argument to convince people to buy expensive storage solutions. Sometimes, what you pay for ends up being an inferior poorly designed system created with expensive proprietary components.
I'm not suggesting people buy el-cheapo rickety storage solutions, just be smart about your purchase and realize there are companies out their who will charge you big bucks for a mediocre solution when it's not necessarily appropriate. Look at what your needs are and chose from solutions that will meet them.
I'm a big fan of IDE RAID. A standard tactic storage companies used when they had no products that could compete against it is "You get what you pay for." Of course, that's not true and the smart customers knew it which is why those same storage companies have since introduced products based on IDE RAID.
Isn't this exactly what he current fix is doing? I checked my registry after applying the fix and that key listed on that page seems to have been added.
Comcast will route for your domain - I've been doing it for 9 months.
Good to know!
They could so easily have just gone the "all SMTP traffic must go to our hosts" route, but they're doing it the right way instead. Nice to see.
Absolutely! I have a mail server sitting on my Comcast account and I send and receive with it. It would have been a major pain if they blocked all SMTP traffic since they probably wouldn't relay my mail for the addresses on my domain. I would have had to route mail through another machine on another port which is a horrible solution. Eventually I'd end up having to change ISP's which would be quite painful.
Kudo's for making an effort to not break email for those of us who don't use their email system.