I strongly suspect that laptops will be the big one here.
Virtually all laptops, excluding on a few high end workstation/gamer beasts, are 1HDD and (still common; but getting rarer) 1 optical drive. And, in a laptop, there isn't exactly much room to monkey with the shipping configuration...
Given that Intel has held the crown for reasonably high performance at laptop-friendly TDPs, I'm assuming that laptop makers would really like to get their hands on the latest silicon so that their roadmaps stay mostly accurate.
Small form factor and very small form factor desktops may also want in, for the same reasons. If you can only physically fit 2 drives in the case, only having 2 ports isn't a huge issue(Joe Tweaker who wants to put one of those 4-2.5inch-trays-in-one-5.25inch-bay devices in place of the optical drive will have to suffer; but nobody else will care...
It will be more interesting; but less certain, to see if production of standard motherboards resumes. By all accounts, the built-in intel SATA ports are(when working) competitive or better than most outboard ones cheap enough to integrate on a mass-market motherboard, plus they don't eat PCIe lanes. From a design perspective, it'd be easy enough to not solder headers for the faulty ports, and leave people with just the 6GB/s chipset ports and 4-6 provided by a 3rd party controller; but it remains to be seen if that will be acceptable to enthusiasts...
I suspect that LG has no actual interest in damaging the success of blu-ray as such; but are rather just playing the classic "Patents: Mutually Assured Destruction" game that large companies play. Since patents are so numerous, and often so broad, it is likely that both Sony and LG are guilty as sin of violating one another's patents. However, Sony was tactless enough to sue LG about it. Instead of just trying a conventional defense-in-court(and potentially ending up paying out serious cash and/or having injunctions placed against important products), LG is counter-suing. Since both parties know that they, and their opponent, are almost certainly guilty, the end result will probably be an out-of-court arrangement of some sort, with an agreement to drop the issue, and possibly a cash payment from the party with the less impressive patent chest to the one with the more impressive one...
Aside from the futile legal costs this imposes on the big players, there are two main problems with this status-quo strategy:
One, it gives the large players substantial latitude to threaten, and then crush or aquire, small competitors. If it is titan to titan, both sides can be reasonably assured that the other violates their patents in some ways and they violate the other's patents in some ways. If it is a titan vs. a startup, the latter has few or no patents to violate, and almost certainly violates(or is close enough to potentially violating that they could be tied up in court long after the VC money runs out...) the larger company's patents. This creates an unfortunate pro-incumbent pressure.
Second, of course, are the patent trolls. As long as you don't produce anything but lawsuits, you probably don't violate anybody's patents. You therefore spend your time acquiring patents at fire sales and bankruptcies in the greatest bulk possible, at the lowest cost possible, and then use those to shake down the people who actually do produce things. Since a protracted legal battle is expensive and risky(because of product injunctions or willful infringement damages), you can usually walk away with a quick chunk of cash if you size your extortion demands correctly.
I imagine that there are a few factors that contribute:
Given MS's near total monopoly in the non-Apple desktop/laptop segment, there might be some legal trouble if they tried to push OEMs too hard on things like preinstalled software from other vendors. Making the provision of a "clean" OS reinstall disk that will accept the key on the little microsoft chassis sticker a condition of the OEM licence might be more doable(they seem to have mandated the chassis sticker easily enough, so far so that even the assorted high end/fashion concept laptops put out by the PC OEMs from time to time end up adopting assorted hilarious tricks for hiding the sticker while still having it affixed to the chassis...) Actually forbidding 3rd party software could get really sticky, though. From a techy perspective, there is a pretty obvious difference between, say, forbidding Firefox/Chrome, and forbidding "HP Preload Shitware Suit: now with drivers for every HP product ever made except the one you just tried to plug in kept pre-loaded in RAM for your convenience"; but trying to develop a legally sound definition that would draw the line between tactical/strategic anticompetitive banning and user experience banning would be very tricky indeed.
Microsoft's fairly strong cultural and economic orientation toward the enterprise probably doesn't help either: while dealing with craplets and reinstall media(or lack thereof. "Hey guys, lets save 25 cents by grabbing 5GB of the HDD for a "restore partition with all our crapware on it! Hard drives never fail, requiring a re-install to a new HDD, so that should be an iron-clad strategy!") annoys me when dealing with home/very small business cases, at work(a modest-size outfit) we have a single system-wide Volume License key, and an essentially unlimited supply of downloaded/supplied by MS for some nominal fee VLK media. The people who are buying computers by the pallet-load Just Don't Have to Care, so they have no real reason to twist MS's arm. Even if the OEM does install crap on their corporate models(less likely, since the shitware vendors are less likely to pay them for installs that are just going to get nuked...) we don't even notice. We just PXE boot them right into our network imaging tool, and dump our pre-built VLK image on them(Dell, and others, will even, for a small additional fee, install your custom image at the factory, if you are buying in correct bulk...)
Finally, unlike Apple, Microsoft has a much greater potential piracy problem(which, unfortunately, they are willing to compromise the customer experience to try to solve...) Apple knows that every copy of OSX is either running on a Mac(for which they got paid) or running on a hackintosh(which is enough of a hassle that Apple's core "pay more for smoother" demographic probably isn't too involved) Their only real losses are from people who buy a mac and then pirate the subsequent OS revisions...
Windows, on the other hand, is explicitly supported by virtually all PC hardware on the market. They can control the big-name whitebox OEMs; but there are millions, probably hundreds of them, of homebuilds and small-time whiteboxers whose hardware is 100% compatible; but over which MS has only DRM-based control(same with the "purchased OEM with home basic, pirated Ultimate" crowd). It is unfortunate; but not wildly surprising, that MS has been comparatively willing to increase the hassle for honest users to attempt to foil the pirate base...
Since I use linux at home and only deal with windows in an expensive-but-daily-hassles-are-invisible VLK environment, it isn't my problem; but if MS really cared about user experience, it strikes me that their close relationship with major PC OEMs would be highly useful. If a machine is has a license for Windows version X, home/premium/business/ultimate, the OEM could be provided with an MS-signed machine-readable file stating the same, just a dinky little text or XML snippet, that they could burn into the BIOS/TPM. MS could then provide a tiny little utility(
It would appear that IBM's actual message was "The US would fall behind if a large contract with IBM were not signed right away"...
It's not as though multinational corporations deliver press release warnings out of patriotic sentiment and an undying love of their natal land; but purely as a tactical or strategic measure for advancing their interests.
I thought that the whole point of "cloud" was to (within the limitations of bandwidth and latency) abstract away the details of location and configuration of the server iron so that the specialist datacenter guys could do their thing as efficiently as possible, and everybody else could be served up idealized abstractions corresponding to their requirements, whether that be idealized VMs that migrate around ugly physical hardware failures, or idealized email hosts that don't involve looking at the dirty details of the mailserver daemon and storage mechanism...
Wouldn't you just build the datacenter(s) wherever land and power are cheap, and then make sure that the places where the bright techies already are(university towns, etc.) have decent internet connectivity so that the developers and startups and so forth can talk to your fancy new cloud datacenters right from the coffeeshop where they already are?
Am I missing something about how "cloud" works, or is this something of a holdover of the classic command-and-control-white-elephant model of "Hey, let's build an entire city dedicated to activity X!"?
Oh ok. Special ed software is ghastly stuff. I'd say incrementally better than psychological testing/scoring software; but that whole segment makes me shudder...
What sort of asshole-designed/marketed software are you running into that will only install from an optical drive?
I do a fair bit of x86 wintel deployment, and 99% of our installs are just "msiexec/i \\someserver\someprograminstaller.msi/passive" or, for legacy stuff, "\\someserver\someprograminstaller.exe/answerfile=foo.ini"...
For a few recalcitrant cases, we use the above method to install virtual CD software, and then load CD images of the package in question...
Outside of Very Small business, not much time at all. System imaging tools and hardware homogeneity are your friend.
For sheer network throughput reasons(plus all the domain-join dicking around), a bare metal restore might take about an hour; but only a few minutes are human attended time. Dump the sucker on the network -> F12 -> PXE boot -> new machine pops up in management console -> scripted process does a WMI query to determine model and then dumps a suitable image on the sucker....
That is one of the main reasons I got the hell out of home-user IT as much as possible. The hourly is actually a little better; but dealing with people who don't have their install media, don't have media for the 3k worth of software they "got from work", don't have backups, and expect you to save their celeron shitbox with 5,2173 distinct malware infections in under 15 minutes, because that is how it works on TV(and anything that happens for the 6 months after you touch the bastard is your fault) Just Isn't Worth It.
Give me standardized hardware, actual tools, and networked backups any day...
I suspect that the one really pissed is Microsoft.
The vendor, at least, gets paid, and all their competitors are doing the same thing; but Microsoft doesn't see the cash, and the bloatware makes them look pathetic next to OSX, even in areas where they don't deserve it.
Slave for months getting Windows N+1 to boot really fast? Hahah, suckers, HP just signed a deal with 3 AV companies at once... Kiss your positive consumer perception goodbye.
OEMs who don't ship stock windows media with windows-licenced PCs deserve to burn in hell; but it is hard to blame the PC OEMS, who all ship essentially undifferentiated product on extremely thin margins from trying to make a few bucks where the can(the comparatively competitive world of shitware vendors) to make up for the bucks that they can't make(intel, MS)... Particularly when, for the most part, they do have corporate lines that are unafflicted by the plague. Either you get the subsidized hardware, and suffer(or reinstall), or you pay the extra to get the good stuff.
More importantly: Because the whitebox x86 market is a knife-fight-in-a-telephone booth.
On the plus side, this means that you can get more computrons for your dollar than at just about any point in history, at any given moment. On the minus side, it means that what you buy will reflect the consequences of ruthless cost cutting(and bloatware is, in essence, a form of cost cutting...)
Trouble is, as much as consumers hate bloatware, they'll chose the cheapest box on the shelf time and again. Ye olde laws of economics pretty much guarantee that the cheapest box on the shelf will be the one whose software has negative value...
Now, as your friendly local smirking linux user, I find the fact that your suffering powers my cheap hardware amusing. However, in the spirit of charity, here is how to avoid bloatware:
Option 1: Buy "corporate". For a modest premium, you can go with the corporate, rather than "consumer" version of your x86 packager of choice. It will cost more; but the packagers know not to fuck with corporate, and the bloatware-pushers know that the value of bloatware that is 99% assured to be blown away with a corporate standard image is near zero.
Option 2: Pay the local geek kid a pizza(or a six-pack) to install windows from scratch. It's tedious; but it isn't hard, and you'll get a fully bloatware-free setup for less than the cost of Option 1. An even lower budget version of option 2 would involve just running PC-decrapifier yourself...
Option 3: Embrace the dark kingdom of the turtlenecked one: Apple's OS differentiation gives them strong ability to resist race-to-the-bottom pressures. You will face the minor niggle of sponsored safari bookmarks and (the especially galling) offer from Apple itself to "go pro" with quicktime(Jobs, you turtlenecked bastard, this mac pro cost me 4 grand. I'll burn in hell before I give you another $20 to run quicktime without being harassed....)
I suspect that neither Wikileaks nor Anonymous are interested in engaging in "Civil disobedience".
In the case of Wikileaks, they aren't "Civily disobedient"; because they don't actually tend to break laws. They do obviously have some contact with people who do; but their operations(while deeply unpopular) are not illegal.
Anonymous, on the other hand, is perfectly happy to do illegal things; but doesn't seem to see the point in getting punished in an effort to maintain the moral high ground. They are(aside from the ones who are in it purely for amusement), essentially engaging in the logic of retributive or revolutionary violence, albeit in bloodless and electronic forms. Irregular resistance fighters have no interest in being caught to "generate sympathy", they have an interest in inflicting damage on strategic targets, obtaining intelligence, discrediting their enemies, and then getting away(so do criminals, of course. The classification depends on the percieved legitimacy of their actions).
As you say, these guys are definitely not in the same class as the followers of Ghandi or MLK. This appears to be by design. Wikileaks, by all appearances, is interested in maintaining a legal operation to lower the cost of whistle-blowing in situations where that could open one to heavy retribution. Anonymous, while too nebulous to have a single agenda, consists of a sort of core that has embraced the logic of violent(but bloodless) direct action, along with a cloud of recreational me-toos who participate in some of the more trivial ops.
Whether you think that this is good, bad, or just a matter of style is a different question; but it would appear that they are not aiming at "Civil disobedience"(having judged it as either too personally costly, too ineffective, or perhaps both)...
You really have to define "your own society" in clear terms to work this little moral conundrum out...
Wikileaks, and their anonymous friends, are definitely attacking the secrecy of certain state and corporate entities that exist on American soil and/or are paid for with US taxpayer funds. Is that enough to make them "our own society"? Or does the fact that a clandestine morass of opaque state functionaries, often quite a few levels removed from anything resembling a "representative" is dubiously in line with a democratic republic make them a sort of cancerous outgrowth of "our own society"?
I'm not playing the "Well, man, it's like, all relative; because one person's hero is another's terrorist, man." card. These are real questions that, arguably, have cogent answers(albeit ones reliant on certain axiomatic assumptions that the answerer brings to the table).
Societies constantly attack themselves in order to survive: the police spend basically all their time hunting down and hauling in for trial citizens and residents whose behavior is considered to have put them against society rather than in it. Politicians constantly attack one anothers' programmes, in a process intended to produce the best or most representative outcome. Assorted NGOs and individuals constantly bring suits against one another and the state trying to redress various perceived wrongs. As with a complex multicellular organism, where killing abberant cells before they metastasize and kill you is as important a job as killing external pathogens before they kill you, the maintenance of a complex society is a constant process of defense from external enemies and(particularly for a militarily strong and geographically lucky country like the US) culling internal enemies and dangerous trends.
Unless we define "our society" more or less tautologically as "whatever society we are participating in at the moment"; it is the case that there is an ideal "our society" and an actual "the society we are doing". When the two differ too much, "our society" becomes a dead letter, used primarily for propaganda purposes by "the society we are doing". Fighting against that trend, which frequently means attacking, sometimes in accordance with the rules of "the society we are doing"(as with constitutional challenge court cases), sometimes against those rules(leaks, hacks, etc.) "the society we are doing", is a necessary part of staying reasonably in line with "our society".
It is a matter of legitimate debate whether or not Wikileaks is attacking "our society" or "the society we are actually doing", and how different those two are; but it is not a matter of trivial debate.
I wholly agree that Wikipedia is far from unusable in its present state, either as a reader or an editor.
My point was simply that, if you want fresh blood/more volunteer laborers(which is properly among the top objectives of wikiHQ, though not the exclusive one) you need to continually scrutinize your operation, your retention, your acquisitions and your losses and who you aren't reaching at all. Only with that information in mind can you make cogent decisions about how best to proceed and what(if any) attempts at change would have a likely higher benefit than cost.
In this case, if you are asking people to do work for no money, you probably do need to focus on how much fun your project is. A hard core of obsessive rules-lawyers does serve as an excellent sort of "immune system" against the entropic tendencies of internet vandalism; but that population only knows so much about so many topics. If you want more labor, or labor with other expertise, you have to keep your immune system from becoming an autoimmune disease...
Oh, I totally support his right to be pissed, he would know better than I what hurts within his social context.
I was just noting that, from the perspective of the jaded internet at large, the entire collection didn't even cause a facial muscle twitch. Probably not even breaking out of the bottom 25% in terms of vicious insult, and definitely below average in humor generally. Not even as funny as the average lolcat, and far less tasteless than the classic "You win the prize" or similar...
With the proliferation of student IDs at many schools, it's an annual occasion...
Also, many of the captions suggest that he has some theater background(Oh, horror, she just called him an actor!). Not exactly wildly out of the ordinary for cast shots to be taken(especially now that some parent/teacher with an interest in the program can reliably be assumed, in many school districts, to have a reasonably fancy digital camera, and one of those 'neutral vaguely cloudy backdrop' screens doesn't cost that much and lasts for ages).
Until their base of "confused old people who pay $20 a month to hear 'You've Got Mail' whenever their bloated AOL client connects over the (cheaper, faster) DSL they are actually using..." dies off, AOL should be able to operate with a certain degree of freedom.
Longterm, their prospects are rather grim(which is presumably why they are buying up non-doomed properties while the cash holds out); but anybody who hasn't switched away from an AOL subscription by now(either to DSL for incrementally less money and more speed, cable/fiber for more money much more speed, or no-name dialup for the same product at 1/2 to 1/3 the price) is probably a till-death-do-us-part customer...
It is certainly conceivable that that might be the result. I just suspect that there is no good way of knowing what a singularity-spawned entity might find "interesting" or what ethical system, if any, it might follow. Even if it does follow one, we may or may not be within the scope of it. Insects are much more complex and capable than slime molds, which are much more complex and capable than bacteria. Humans site their campfires on top of all three without even noticing...
I have no particular reason to suspect some 'I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream'-esque scenario of a malicious supercomputer, malice seems rather petty, if anything. However, I could easily imagine that a particularly fascinating and computationally expensive problem in physics, say, might catch our singularity overlord's attention, at which point it would casually convert the entire crust(including the thin biofilm at the top) into more computational apparatus so as to finish before the sun gives out...
Yeah, it would be as easy as simply putting up an alternate, ultra-low-fi version of the site. Most people would use the normal version, so ad revenue probably wouldn't be an issue.
Especially after the marketing department learned that you'd just created a virtually perfect mechanism for identifying the users most likely to be interested in VT220s and O'Reilly manuals on server administration and programming.../evil.
Geocentricism actually works reasonably well, for many terrestrial applications, as well. It starts to break down when you want to venture too far beyond earth orbit(though even a trip to the moon might be doable); but any of the late-pre-Copernican astronomers could handle navigation and timekeeping at least as well as any heliocentrist until at least Kepler. Even then, the differences are small enough to be of limited relevance for many applications.
Building good models is about knowing how right you need to be(sometimes this is trivial, sometimes this is Real Serious Business), rather than being as right as possible...
On the minus side, robots that actually perform general purpose functions in arbitrary environments are somewhere between "damn pricey" and "unavailable".
On the, um, "plus", side automation of well specified functions in controlled environments is displacing human laborers fast enough that humans to perform general purpose functions in arbitrary environments are likely to just keep getting cheaper...
Slashdot Mirror
I strongly suspect that laptops will be the big one here.
Virtually all laptops, excluding on a few high end workstation/gamer beasts, are 1HDD and (still common; but getting rarer) 1 optical drive. And, in a laptop, there isn't exactly much room to monkey with the shipping configuration...
Given that Intel has held the crown for reasonably high performance at laptop-friendly TDPs, I'm assuming that laptop makers would really like to get their hands on the latest silicon so that their roadmaps stay mostly accurate.
Small form factor and very small form factor desktops may also want in, for the same reasons. If you can only physically fit 2 drives in the case, only having 2 ports isn't a huge issue(Joe Tweaker who wants to put one of those 4-2.5inch-trays-in-one-5.25inch-bay devices in place of the optical drive will have to suffer; but nobody else will care...
It will be more interesting; but less certain, to see if production of standard motherboards resumes. By all accounts, the built-in intel SATA ports are(when working) competitive or better than most outboard ones cheap enough to integrate on a mass-market motherboard, plus they don't eat PCIe lanes. From a design perspective, it'd be easy enough to not solder headers for the faulty ports, and leave people with just the 6GB/s chipset ports and 4-6 provided by a 3rd party controller; but it remains to be seen if that will be acceptable to enthusiasts...
There is a moderately obscure(and deservedly, it isn't all that good) 1977 horror film on this very subject.
"Death Bed: The Bed that Eats"
I suspect that LG has no actual interest in damaging the success of blu-ray as such; but are rather just playing the classic "Patents: Mutually Assured Destruction" game that large companies play. Since patents are so numerous, and often so broad, it is likely that both Sony and LG are guilty as sin of violating one another's patents. However, Sony was tactless enough to sue LG about it. Instead of just trying a conventional defense-in-court(and potentially ending up paying out serious cash and/or having injunctions placed against important products), LG is counter-suing. Since both parties know that they, and their opponent, are almost certainly guilty, the end result will probably be an out-of-court arrangement of some sort, with an agreement to drop the issue, and possibly a cash payment from the party with the less impressive patent chest to the one with the more impressive one...
Aside from the futile legal costs this imposes on the big players, there are two main problems with this status-quo strategy:
One, it gives the large players substantial latitude to threaten, and then crush or aquire, small competitors. If it is titan to titan, both sides can be reasonably assured that the other violates their patents in some ways and they violate the other's patents in some ways. If it is a titan vs. a startup, the latter has few or no patents to violate, and almost certainly violates(or is close enough to potentially violating that they could be tied up in court long after the VC money runs out...) the larger company's patents. This creates an unfortunate pro-incumbent pressure.
Second, of course, are the patent trolls. As long as you don't produce anything but lawsuits, you probably don't violate anybody's patents. You therefore spend your time acquiring patents at fire sales and bankruptcies in the greatest bulk possible, at the lowest cost possible, and then use those to shake down the people who actually do produce things. Since a protracted legal battle is expensive and risky(because of product injunctions or willful infringement damages), you can usually walk away with a quick chunk of cash if you size your extortion demands correctly.
I imagine that there are a few factors that contribute:
Given MS's near total monopoly in the non-Apple desktop/laptop segment, there might be some legal trouble if they tried to push OEMs too hard on things like preinstalled software from other vendors. Making the provision of a "clean" OS reinstall disk that will accept the key on the little microsoft chassis sticker a condition of the OEM licence might be more doable(they seem to have mandated the chassis sticker easily enough, so far so that even the assorted high end/fashion concept laptops put out by the PC OEMs from time to time end up adopting assorted hilarious tricks for hiding the sticker while still having it affixed to the chassis...) Actually forbidding 3rd party software could get really sticky, though. From a techy perspective, there is a pretty obvious difference between, say, forbidding Firefox/Chrome, and forbidding "HP Preload Shitware Suit: now with drivers for every HP product ever made except the one you just tried to plug in kept pre-loaded in RAM for your convenience"; but trying to develop a legally sound definition that would draw the line between tactical/strategic anticompetitive banning and user experience banning would be very tricky indeed.
Microsoft's fairly strong cultural and economic orientation toward the enterprise probably doesn't help either: while dealing with craplets and reinstall media(or lack thereof. "Hey guys, lets save 25 cents by grabbing 5GB of the HDD for a "restore partition with all our crapware on it! Hard drives never fail, requiring a re-install to a new HDD, so that should be an iron-clad strategy!") annoys me when dealing with home/very small business cases, at work(a modest-size outfit) we have a single system-wide Volume License key, and an essentially unlimited supply of downloaded/supplied by MS for some nominal fee VLK media. The people who are buying computers by the pallet-load Just Don't Have to Care, so they have no real reason to twist MS's arm. Even if the OEM does install crap on their corporate models(less likely, since the shitware vendors are less likely to pay them for installs that are just going to get nuked...) we don't even notice. We just PXE boot them right into our network imaging tool, and dump our pre-built VLK image on them(Dell, and others, will even, for a small additional fee, install your custom image at the factory, if you are buying in correct bulk...)
Finally, unlike Apple, Microsoft has a much greater potential piracy problem(which, unfortunately, they are willing to compromise the customer experience to try to solve...) Apple knows that every copy of OSX is either running on a Mac(for which they got paid) or running on a hackintosh(which is enough of a hassle that Apple's core "pay more for smoother" demographic probably isn't too involved) Their only real losses are from people who buy a mac and then pirate the subsequent OS revisions...
Windows, on the other hand, is explicitly supported by virtually all PC hardware on the market. They can control the big-name whitebox OEMs; but there are millions, probably hundreds of them, of homebuilds and small-time whiteboxers whose hardware is 100% compatible; but over which MS has only DRM-based control(same with the "purchased OEM with home basic, pirated Ultimate" crowd). It is unfortunate; but not wildly surprising, that MS has been comparatively willing to increase the hassle for honest users to attempt to foil the pirate base...
Since I use linux at home and only deal with windows in an expensive-but-daily-hassles-are-invisible VLK environment, it isn't my problem; but if MS really cared about user experience, it strikes me that their close relationship with major PC OEMs would be highly useful. If a machine is has a license for Windows version X, home/premium/business/ultimate, the OEM could be provided with an MS-signed machine-readable file stating the same, just a dinky little text or XML snippet, that they could burn into the BIOS/TPM. MS could then provide a tiny little utility(
It would appear that IBM's actual message was "The US would fall behind if a large contract with IBM were not signed right away"...
It's not as though multinational corporations deliver press release warnings out of patriotic sentiment and an undying love of their natal land; but purely as a tactical or strategic measure for advancing their interests.
I thought that the whole point of "cloud" was to (within the limitations of bandwidth and latency) abstract away the details of location and configuration of the server iron so that the specialist datacenter guys could do their thing as efficiently as possible, and everybody else could be served up idealized abstractions corresponding to their requirements, whether that be idealized VMs that migrate around ugly physical hardware failures, or idealized email hosts that don't involve looking at the dirty details of the mailserver daemon and storage mechanism...
Wouldn't you just build the datacenter(s) wherever land and power are cheap, and then make sure that the places where the bright techies already are(university towns, etc.) have decent internet connectivity so that the developers and startups and so forth can talk to your fancy new cloud datacenters right from the coffeeshop where they already are?
Am I missing something about how "cloud" works, or is this something of a holdover of the classic command-and-control-white-elephant model of "Hey, let's build an entire city dedicated to activity X!"?
Oh ok. Special ed software is ghastly stuff. I'd say incrementally better than psychological testing/scoring software; but that whole segment makes me shudder...
That is why I am carefully grooming my technocratic midget/mentally handicapped giant duo. I will run bartertown...
What sort of asshole-designed/marketed software are you running into that will only install from an optical drive?
/i \\someserver\someprograminstaller.msi /passive" or, for legacy stuff, "\\someserver\someprograminstaller.exe /answerfile=foo.ini"...
I do a fair bit of x86 wintel deployment, and 99% of our installs are just "msiexec
For a few recalcitrant cases, we use the above method to install virtual CD software, and then load CD images of the package in question...
Outside of Very Small business, not much time at all. System imaging tools and hardware homogeneity are your friend.
For sheer network throughput reasons(plus all the domain-join dicking around), a bare metal restore might take about an hour; but only a few minutes are human attended time. Dump the sucker on the network -> F12 -> PXE boot -> new machine pops up in management console -> scripted process does a WMI query to determine model and then dumps a suitable image on the sucker....
That is one of the main reasons I got the hell out of home-user IT as much as possible. The hourly is actually a little better; but dealing with people who don't have their install media, don't have media for the 3k worth of software they "got from work", don't have backups, and expect you to save their celeron shitbox with 5,2173 distinct malware infections in under 15 minutes, because that is how it works on TV(and anything that happens for the 6 months after you touch the bastard is your fault) Just Isn't Worth It.
Give me standardized hardware, actual tools, and networked backups any day...
I suspect that the one really pissed is Microsoft.
The vendor, at least, gets paid, and all their competitors are doing the same thing; but Microsoft doesn't see the cash, and the bloatware makes them look pathetic next to OSX, even in areas where they don't deserve it.
Slave for months getting Windows N+1 to boot really fast? Hahah, suckers, HP just signed a deal with 3 AV companies at once... Kiss your positive consumer perception goodbye.
OEMs who don't ship stock windows media with windows-licenced PCs deserve to burn in hell; but it is hard to blame the PC OEMS, who all ship essentially undifferentiated product on extremely thin margins from trying to make a few bucks where the can(the comparatively competitive world of shitware vendors) to make up for the bucks that they can't make(intel, MS)... Particularly when, for the most part, they do have corporate lines that are unafflicted by the plague. Either you get the subsidized hardware, and suffer(or reinstall), or you pay the extra to get the good stuff.
More importantly: Because the whitebox x86 market is a knife-fight-in-a-telephone booth.
On the plus side, this means that you can get more computrons for your dollar than at just about any point in history, at any given moment. On the minus side, it means that what you buy will reflect the consequences of ruthless cost cutting(and bloatware is, in essence, a form of cost cutting...)
Trouble is, as much as consumers hate bloatware, they'll chose the cheapest box on the shelf time and again. Ye olde laws of economics pretty much guarantee that the cheapest box on the shelf will be the one whose software has negative value...
Now, as your friendly local smirking linux user, I find the fact that your suffering powers my cheap hardware amusing. However, in the spirit of charity, here is how to avoid bloatware:
Option 1: Buy "corporate". For a modest premium, you can go with the corporate, rather than "consumer" version of your x86 packager of choice. It will cost more; but the packagers know not to fuck with corporate, and the bloatware-pushers know that the value of bloatware that is 99% assured to be blown away with a corporate standard image is near zero.
Option 2: Pay the local geek kid a pizza(or a six-pack) to install windows from scratch. It's tedious; but it isn't hard, and you'll get a fully bloatware-free setup for less than the cost of Option 1. An even lower budget version of option 2 would involve just running PC-decrapifier yourself...
Option 3: Embrace the dark kingdom of the turtlenecked one: Apple's OS differentiation gives them strong ability to resist race-to-the-bottom pressures. You will face the minor niggle of sponsored safari bookmarks and (the especially galling) offer from Apple itself to "go pro" with quicktime(Jobs, you turtlenecked bastard, this mac pro cost me 4 grand. I'll burn in hell before I give you another $20 to run quicktime without being harassed....)
I suspect that neither Wikileaks nor Anonymous are interested in engaging in "Civil disobedience".
In the case of Wikileaks, they aren't "Civily disobedient"; because they don't actually tend to break laws. They do obviously have some contact with people who do; but their operations(while deeply unpopular) are not illegal.
Anonymous, on the other hand, is perfectly happy to do illegal things; but doesn't seem to see the point in getting punished in an effort to maintain the moral high ground. They are(aside from the ones who are in it purely for amusement), essentially engaging in the logic of retributive or revolutionary violence, albeit in bloodless and electronic forms. Irregular resistance fighters have no interest in being caught to "generate sympathy", they have an interest in inflicting damage on strategic targets, obtaining intelligence, discrediting their enemies, and then getting away(so do criminals, of course. The classification depends on the percieved legitimacy of their actions).
As you say, these guys are definitely not in the same class as the followers of Ghandi or MLK. This appears to be by design. Wikileaks, by all appearances, is interested in maintaining a legal operation to lower the cost of whistle-blowing in situations where that could open one to heavy retribution. Anonymous, while too nebulous to have a single agenda, consists of a sort of core that has embraced the logic of violent(but bloodless) direct action, along with a cloud of recreational me-toos who participate in some of the more trivial ops.
Whether you think that this is good, bad, or just a matter of style is a different question; but it would appear that they are not aiming at "Civil disobedience"(having judged it as either too personally costly, too ineffective, or perhaps both)...
You really have to define "your own society" in clear terms to work this little moral conundrum out...
Wikileaks, and their anonymous friends, are definitely attacking the secrecy of certain state and corporate entities that exist on American soil and/or are paid for with US taxpayer funds. Is that enough to make them "our own society"? Or does the fact that a clandestine morass of opaque state functionaries, often quite a few levels removed from anything resembling a "representative" is dubiously in line with a democratic republic make them a sort of cancerous outgrowth of "our own society"?
I'm not playing the "Well, man, it's like, all relative; because one person's hero is another's terrorist, man." card. These are real questions that, arguably, have cogent answers(albeit ones reliant on certain axiomatic assumptions that the answerer brings to the table).
Societies constantly attack themselves in order to survive: the police spend basically all their time hunting down and hauling in for trial citizens and residents whose behavior is considered to have put them against society rather than in it. Politicians constantly attack one anothers' programmes, in a process intended to produce the best or most representative outcome. Assorted NGOs and individuals constantly bring suits against one another and the state trying to redress various perceived wrongs. As with a complex multicellular organism, where killing abberant cells before they metastasize and kill you is as important a job as killing external pathogens before they kill you, the maintenance of a complex society is a constant process of defense from external enemies and(particularly for a militarily strong and geographically lucky country like the US) culling internal enemies and dangerous trends.
Unless we define "our society" more or less tautologically as "whatever society we are participating in at the moment"; it is the case that there is an ideal "our society" and an actual "the society we are doing". When the two differ too much, "our society" becomes a dead letter, used primarily for propaganda purposes by "the society we are doing". Fighting against that trend, which frequently means attacking, sometimes in accordance with the rules of "the society we are doing"(as with constitutional challenge court cases), sometimes against those rules(leaks, hacks, etc.) "the society we are doing", is a necessary part of staying reasonably in line with "our society".
It is a matter of legitimate debate whether or not Wikileaks is attacking "our society" or "the society we are actually doing", and how different those two are; but it is not a matter of trivial debate.
I wholly agree that Wikipedia is far from unusable in its present state, either as a reader or an editor.
My point was simply that, if you want fresh blood/more volunteer laborers(which is properly among the top objectives of wikiHQ, though not the exclusive one) you need to continually scrutinize your operation, your retention, your acquisitions and your losses and who you aren't reaching at all. Only with that information in mind can you make cogent decisions about how best to proceed and what(if any) attempts at change would have a likely higher benefit than cost.
In this case, if you are asking people to do work for no money, you probably do need to focus on how much fun your project is. A hard core of obsessive rules-lawyers does serve as an excellent sort of "immune system" against the entropic tendencies of internet vandalism; but that population only knows so much about so many topics. If you want more labor, or labor with other expertise, you have to keep your immune system from becoming an autoimmune disease...
Oh, I totally support his right to be pissed, he would know better than I what hurts within his social context.
I was just noting that, from the perspective of the jaded internet at large, the entire collection didn't even cause a facial muscle twitch. Probably not even breaking out of the bottom 25% in terms of vicious insult, and definitely below average in humor generally. Not even as funny as the average lolcat, and far less tasteless than the classic "You win the prize" or similar...
With the proliferation of student IDs at many schools, it's an annual occasion...
Also, many of the captions suggest that he has some theater background(Oh, horror, she just called him an actor!). Not exactly wildly out of the ordinary for cast shots to be taken(especially now that some parent/teacher with an interest in the program can reliably be assumed, in many school districts, to have a reasonably fancy digital camera, and one of those 'neutral vaguely cloudy backdrop' screens doesn't cost that much and lasts for ages).
AOL learned their lesson very well; back with Time Warner: Buy now, while they still think you are worth something...
Until their base of "confused old people who pay $20 a month to hear 'You've Got Mail' whenever their bloated AOL client connects over the (cheaper, faster) DSL they are actually using..." dies off, AOL should be able to operate with a certain degree of freedom.
Longterm, their prospects are rather grim(which is presumably why they are buying up non-doomed properties while the cash holds out); but anybody who hasn't switched away from an AOL subscription by now(either to DSL for incrementally less money and more speed, cable/fiber for more money much more speed, or no-name dialup for the same product at 1/2 to 1/3 the price) is probably a till-death-do-us-part customer...
It is certainly conceivable that that might be the result. I just suspect that there is no good way of knowing what a singularity-spawned entity might find "interesting" or what ethical system, if any, it might follow. Even if it does follow one, we may or may not be within the scope of it. Insects are much more complex and capable than slime molds, which are much more complex and capable than bacteria. Humans site their campfires on top of all three without even noticing...
I have no particular reason to suspect some 'I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream'-esque scenario of a malicious supercomputer, malice seems rather petty, if anything. However, I could easily imagine that a particularly fascinating and computationally expensive problem in physics, say, might catch our singularity overlord's attention, at which point it would casually convert the entire crust(including the thin biofilm at the top) into more computational apparatus so as to finish before the sun gives out...
Yeah, it would be as easy as simply putting up an alternate, ultra-low-fi version of the site. Most people would use the normal version, so ad revenue probably wouldn't be an issue.
Especially after the marketing department learned that you'd just created a virtually perfect mechanism for identifying the users most likely to be interested in VT220s and O'Reilly manuals on server administration and programming... /evil.
Geocentricism actually works reasonably well, for many terrestrial applications, as well. It starts to break down when you want to venture too far beyond earth orbit(though even a trip to the moon might be doable); but any of the late-pre-Copernican astronomers could handle navigation and timekeeping at least as well as any heliocentrist until at least Kepler. Even then, the differences are small enough to be of limited relevance for many applications.
Building good models is about knowing how right you need to be(sometimes this is trivial, sometimes this is Real Serious Business), rather than being as right as possible...
... to the Singularity. This is great news =)
For whoever or whatever achieves it first...
Everything else goes straight into the matter decompilers for conversion into more computronium.
On the minus side, robots that actually perform general purpose functions in arbitrary environments are somewhere between "damn pricey" and "unavailable".
On the, um, "plus", side automation of well specified functions in controlled environments is displacing human laborers fast enough that humans to perform general purpose functions in arbitrary environments are likely to just keep getting cheaper...