Honestly, Netscape Enterprise Server (in all its incarnations) was one of the worst servers I've ever had to misfortune to develop on and support.
The configuration system was TERRIBLE. The gui was worthless for all but the simplest setups, and if you hand edited ANYTHING (which you were virtually assured to have to do) then using the GUI would cause the whole configuration to become hopelessly corrupt. Worse the server didn't actually do things like CHECK its configuration, it would just operate in a completely erratic fashion.
As if THAT wasn't bad enough the thing NEVER became 100% stable. It was absolutely required to cluster at least 2-3 of these turkeys together to be sure that at least one would make it through any given 24 hour period in decent shape. We had 3 rebooting themselves every day on 8 hour offsets from each other. At least you could HOPE that 2 of them were actually functional at any given moment.
LiveScript was equally a boondoggle. Compared to what else was available at the time (early ASP, CGI scripts) it wasn't TOO bad, but javascript really was NOT up to building any kind of serious app. Just isn't possible to build a really large complex code base using it. I know, I tried...
Finally, the database integration was painful. Informix support kinda sorta worked. Oracle was maybe about 90% of the way there. There was no support for anything else, MAYBE Sybase. But you couldn't call a stored proc or anything beyond basic queries.
Later versions fixed some of the problems, but by the time it got even tolerably usable Apache was already light years ahead.
Network performance between different NICs and using the same NICs with different drivers, different settings, different switches, and different cabling can make a HUGE difference. One of my jobs is working on the design and build out of ticker plants for market data. We tend to hammer on networks REALLY hard!
There are several simple basic things that can easily vary which will make at least a 200% performance difference on either 100baseT or 1000baseT LANs.
For example a lot of card/switch combinations will fail to negotiate full duplex operation, that's a 50% performance hit right there.
Beyond that different cards have different amounts of intelligence and different amounts of buffering and DMA capabilities. Most drivers are generic chip set drivers, so they usually don't optimally set up the hardware. Different implementation bugs in either the card or the driver can also interact in various ways which can seriously degrade performance.
Overall I'd say that if you have a sufficient level of expertise with the drivers and the NIC you can pretty much always get SOME improvement in any given setup, and for the truly bad cases I've seen 3x better performance after tweaking on Linux.
It would be a VAST improvement if I could distribute RCP based applications with a single underlying UI toolkit. SWT is great, but whoever thinks their SWT based app will work cross platform without a LOT of tweaking, is insane;).
That's the People's Front of Judea!
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I really don't think you can compare a 3270 emulator based app to anything modern at all. Seems kind of irrelevant to me. That's 1980's vintage stuff, lol!
Pay levels certainly ARE related to overall business efficiency! It is ridiculous to claim that businesses with bad and inefficient processes are going to be able to pay as well as ones with good processes. They may HAVE to pay equally, and in that case they will FAIL and go out of business.
There may well be in many/most businesses more critical cost centers than IT, but every wasted dollar is wasted. If your business doesn't care about that, then they are stupid and someone is going to hand them their lunch one day in the probably not too distant future.
I also disagree that you have a more reliable infrastructure when you rely on a bunch of stand alone machines that have to be individually managed. Each and every one of those machines is a failure point, and when one fails you now have to spend all the time and energy rebuilding the whole thing to the proper configuration. Whereas in our diskless thin client environment you just send a guy down to swap out the broken terminal and in the mean time the employee can just log on at some other terminal in the interim.
Server side application availability is never a problem either. All application servers are running off a storage pool which has enough redundancy to achieve 100% uptime, and the actual server instances themselves are fairly meaningless, there is no data on them and the servers are either VMs or again machines that boot remote off the pool and can be replaced/failed over with usually no down time at all. The advantages are huge. In a 1000 years I would never even dream of going back.
Pretty much sounds to me like the place you're talking about is seriously behind the times and has some pretty crappy IT management practices (or more likely none at all). In my line of work if a line of business application was unavailable for 3 hours during market hours I'd be out on my ass by the end of the day!
A company with a sensible and cost effective IT infrastructure has the advantage in business. So the choices are you can work for someone that can't pay you well and is always on the verge of being wiped out by the competition, or you can work for the one that leads its industry, pays well, and makes your job easier.
Thus I would argue that companies who stick to the old fashioned way of doing things based on some misguided idea that they are coddling their employees are dead ducks in the long run. Not only that but by having a crappy and unmanagable IT infrastructure they will actually be making the work environment less friendly and the lives of their staff more difficult.
99% of office workers in any case do not care about, nor even understand beyond a simple level what goes on to make their computer work right. They just want to sit down at the thing and do the job they are hired to do. They could not care less if the app they run is on their desktop or on a Citrix farm someplace or if it is a web app. And they have no clue or care about if their computer boots off a hard drive or the network.
What they DO care about is that their documents are accessible from any machine, that their settings and applications come up no matter where they log in, that their files are never lost forever, etc. Since these things are MUCH easier to achieve and can be done much cheaper in a more centralized IT infrastructure, that is what they will like to use.
Additionally departments are no longer so keen on controlling their own IT assets as they once were. 15 years ago a manager would think it made sense to 'own' his own desktop machines. Nowadays he'll have to care about security, data integrity, configuration management, etc. if he does that because modern businesses have learned to care about stuff like that. Today's manager would much rather leave that to the IT department budget than be distracted from his primary work to deal with it internally.
Granted there are plenty of companies with bad IT departments or no real clue about IT where the net result of centralization can easily be negative, but that is not a criticism of the superiority of the approach, it is just a bad implementation. In today's business environment a business that can't implement well, WILL eventually pay the price for that failing. It really isn't a choice anymore. Its a tough world out there and only the best are going to survive the next few years.
The trend towards reconsolidation of functionality in the back room and away from the client desktop only grows stronger with time.
The conditions under which fat 'client' PC computing originally appeared no longer pertain. I'll illustrate with an example. In the mid 80's I was working for an engineering firm. They had a few 1000 users, a LAN, a cluster of computers in the basement, and a dumb terminal on everyone's desk. Over the next 5 years disconnected PCs rapidly replaced a lot of these terminals for several reasons.
1) Networking PCs (or anything) was expensive, so if you NEEDED a PC, it was almost guaranteed not to be on the network.
2) People needed graphics capabilities and the ability to read data from floppies etc which were not possible with a dumb terminal in that day.
3) Department managers loved to control stuff, so of course they'd rather have a PC that was THEIRS and not a terminal, which 'belonged' to IT.
In every other respect the switch to PCs was negative overall. They were MUCH more expensive, required management, couldn't be backed up easily, and usually couldn't get access to resources on the network except via sneakernet.
Nowadays the 'positives' for PC/workstation fat client type machines are virtually gone. They WILL be networked and since x86 PC architecture is virtually ubiquitous there is no longer a distinction in capabilities between a PC and a 'terminal' (thin client). Furthermore the costs of unmanaged systems have finally begun to become fully appreciated. IT can't tolerate machines on the network they don't control and departments can't afford to or be bothered with dealing with the associated costs/risks themselves, so both IT and the client department would rather let IT manage things, and IT has no incentive not to then make everything a thin client.
Now, maybe the environment you work in is really backward and has not figured all this out yet. That's true with a lot of small businesses, but they are learning, and it is getting quite easy to provision network centric applications which often only require a web browser on the client side. So even the small businesses are less and less needing fat clients. I'll predict that no such thing will exist as a full up PC in business at all in 10 years. There will still be workstations for very specific uses, CAD or high end video/graphics work, but even those will mostly or even entirely utilize networked resources to boot and for storage.
In my business this sort of transition has already pretty much completed. The existing PCs are just old legacy hardware that will be replaced with diskless machines when they go end of life.
How many businesses do video and graphics work? Not many. I'd wager that not 1 in 10,000 business machines is used regularly for any CPU intensive task. Developers would definitely be somewhat of an exception, but there really aren't that many development groups out there doing compiles of 10+ million line code bases all day every day. I mean I can compile a Linux Kernel on my 2.4 ghz P4 machine (vintage 2004) in a few minutes as long as I have 2 gigs of RAM in it.
No, 99.9999% of all business machines don't need to be even as powerful as your average home PC, where someone might actually WANT to edit some video, etc. now and then. Those business machines run Office, Web Browser, Outlook, and maybe one or two other business apps.
In fact I would venture that business is where the desktop performance requirements are falling and will fall the fastest and furthest, and where energy efficiency makes the biggest difference. Any heavy lifting that needs to be done can always be moved to server side applications. There will always be a few high end workstations, but the average business PC is pretty close to being a diskless thin client now in any good shop, and that will be the norm within 3 years.
I agree, from what we know now it is probable that a fetus would not develop properly in zero g. Still, it hasn't been conclusively demonstrated, so I'd say the jury is out on that at least until someone sends some mice to the ISS and they determine what happens one way or the other.
Still, that problem doesn't really sound like too much of a deal breaker to me. Maybe mom has to spend some time in centripital gravity for a bit. Worst case you need a full 1g for the entire 9 months, which would be a hassle, but it could be as simple as a half hour a day for 3 weeks in.1 g. People would probably do that anyway for other reasons.
I still say the problems attendant with living on Mars, coupled with the utter lack of any good economic argument in favor of it, makes the idea of space colonies quite a bit more logical and appealing IMHO.
1) Because it will make much more sense to live in free space (IE on an asteroid or space colony) where you avoid the huge energy cost of going up and down a gravity well.
3) The environment of Mars is actually MUCH harsher than the environment in space, and probably much harsher than the environment of the Moon. So why exactly would we so desire to live there?
Wouldn't that gravity well be better on the biology of those living there than the microgravity associated with smaller rocky bodies?
What evidence is there to support that hypothesis? Granted, it is not far fetched, but we don't actually KNOW what level of gravity has what effects. My guess would be that some effects might be mitigated, maybe even completely, others might not be significantly reduced at all.
Plus, wouldn't even a thin atmosphere be better for protection and help reduce the need for vacuum-proof structures than near-vacuum conditions?
No, because the atmosphere of Mars is already close enough to a vacuum that from a physiological standpoint the difference is irrelevant. The atmospheric pressure on the surface of Mars is 6 millibars, 1/150th of the pressure at the surface of the Earth. From a standpoint of engineering a structure or breathing, it is no better than a vacuum. Yet from the standpoint of carrying dust into everything and possibly facilitating corrosion and other equipment damage it could prove to be quite a serious problem. So, I would, as an engineer, MUCH rather deal with the problems of the Lunar environment than the Martian environment, since I will avoid all of those problems.
Wouldn't Mars also be more desirable because it has mostly cleared the neighborhood of other heavenly objects such that the risk of one's home being smashed into by another particularly large rock is massively diminshed?
Exactly how often do you think main belt asteroids collide with each other? On average not often at all. In fact such collisions probably only happen once in many millions of years, possibly billions of years. Those bodies which were in orbits which were likely to collide with things mostly did so billions of years ago and were either sent into orbits where they no longer hit other stuff or were pounded to bits long ago. The chances of an asteroid hitting Mars are actually probably at least as high as those of one asteroid hitting another. Besides, if you have the technology to live on an asteroid, you can probably shift its orbit by a few 100 meters if you ever need to...
Wouldn't the fact of working in an environment with an up, a down, and other gravity-based rules like that which we have on Earth be easier for workers who have to do things like maintenance, construction, and the like be better than attempting to work in microgravity where accidently losing a tool means that it's probably gone forever instead of being able to just bend down and pick it up off the ground?
Oh, it would probably be easier for you or me right now today, no doubt. However zero g assembly IN GENERAL should be quite easy. No need for massive cranes, scaffolds, support structures, etc. I highly suspect that once we are even 1/8th as knowledgeable about zero g construction as we are about 1 g construction today we will have a much easier time with it.
Wouldn't it be fairly practical to bore down into Mars to construct a habitat with significantly less materials (like basically a cap at the top of the bore hole) such that materials from Earth aren't depleted nearly as much for space?
And why wouldn't this solution work equally well when dealing with an asteroid? In fact it seems to me it would work much better and be much easier. You don't have to DIG anything, just dump a whole lot of material around your habitat if thats what you need to do. No need to worry about tunneling or weight, etc. It
But just because nobody has YET solved the 'problem' of living in zero g doesn't mean it is insoluable. Doesn't even mean it is HARD to solve, just means we haven't figured it out yet. Not surprising, given the tiny amount of actual experience we have of humans living in zero g.
In fact, even the assertion that we can't live in zero g is open to serious question. Granted we know that people subjected to zero g for extended periods of time undergo certain physiological changes, none of those changes has yet proven to be life threatening. We don't know of any upper limit to the amount of time someone could live in zero g. In fact it would seem that if there is such a limit it must be at least several years.
I imagine between some type of exercise regimen, centripital gravity, and medication, it may well prove to be that people can live indefinitely in zero g without any serious problems, and quite possibly even reproduce successfully under those conditions.
Granted, this is all an unknown, but balanced against the HUGE excess cost of living on a planetary surface I think we'll be pretty motivated to find those answers if we ever do leave the Earth permanently. And if we CANNOT live indefinitely away from the surface of a planet? Then why would we not live on the surface of the Earth? With the resources of the whole Solar System at our disposal it would seem vastly less expensive and more pleasant than living on a cold, virtually airless low gravity world like Mars.
The 'real estate' value of Mars is always so totally overstated. NOBODY WILL EVER LIVE THERE. You want to know why?
1) Because it will make much more sense to live in free space (IE on an asteroid or space colony) where you avoid the huge energy cost of going up and down a gravity well.
2) Mars provides virtually nothing in the way of resources which are not available in places easier to get to.
3) The environment of Mars is actually MUCH harsher than the environment in space, and probably much harsher than the environment of the Moon. So why exactly would we so desire to live there?
4) If environments as harsh as Mars are desirable real estate for people to live on, then why aren't Antarctica and Green Land, and the Sahara Desert all chock full of people already? They are CERTAINLY much less harsh and much cheaper places to live. Good luck selling those Martian building lots...
5) Even speculating about Terraforming is pretty much beyond science. The time and energy inputs required are probably 1000's and maybe millions or billions of times anything we can deploy today. The time frame could easily range into the millions of years no matter how capable you are. There is certainly no sense at all in planning a space program based on a payoff that somehow relies on a technology that is no more than an idle dream which might exist in 200 or 1000 years, if ever.
This does all tie in to some extent to the OP, Mars' value is not ever going to be economic. Its value is purely scientific and there is no reasonable anticipation that it will ever be otherwise. Spoiling the pristine conditions on Mars would seriously degrade the value of exo-biology work done there in the future. So it IS a bad idea, and it would be a costly mistake.
Now, the question of the actual safety of Phobos-Grunt is a whole other thing. We'll just have to leave that to experts. At least they value the principle of avoiding contamination. Maybe they're a little biased, but the risk doesn't seem super excessive to me. OTOH it also sounds like the experiment itself is mostly a PR stunt, so on that basis I'd give it the thumbs down. Not worth making a huge stink about though.
Sure, if you want to pay something like $800 a month for your internet access you can bypass Fairpoint by purchasing an entire T1. I suppose if you just want say 512k bandwidth you could get a fractional T and maybe pay oh only like $250 a month! What a deal!
Oh, and of course don't forget, now you'll need to purchase a nice expensive router/dsu/csu instead of going with the standard cheap consumer stuff.
I'm thrilled, that's a really amazing alternative, lol! Granted the service will be somewhat higher quality than DSL/cable, but I hardly think you can really consider commercial data services as an equivalent replacement for retail grade service.
Verizon can't even provide me with reliable VOICE service. EvDO here is pretty worthless. In any case even if it worked fine your talking FAR less bandwidth and MUCH greater latency. There really is no comparison. Had satellite service for a while and that was a joke too.
Not saying nothing will ever come along, but at least up here in Vermont (and I'm in the most populated area of the state) there are 2 viable choices, Comcast, and Fairpoint.
Uh, I'm a Fairpoint DSL customer right now myself. They are WAY WAY cheaper (still around $50 a month for naked "high speed" DSL) than the amazing plethora of one other choice, the cable co, which is even more predatory (well, maybe not anymore) than the telco.
So, for the blessings of actually being able TO HAVE STINKING EMAIL I'll have to now pay what, about $80 a month? Lovely.
BTW, I've written everyone down thar 'n flatland, but I aren't holdin my breath... (still, I urge all to do the same).
Re:Scalzi strikes me as closer to Haldeman
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Yeah, it seemed kind of like that to me too, lol.
And hey, my Yog-Sothoth beats your Arioch!;)
Scalzi strikes me as closer to Haldeman
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I can see the comparisons to Heinlien, but OMW really struck me as being very much in the same vein as The Forever War.
Great writer though, so definitely worth checking out anything he writes.
All applets run in the same JVM. This has ALWAYS been true. Each one has its own isolated class loaders and the security manager isolates threads, etc., but your browser will not start multiple JVMs.
That being said, the class loader isolation does mean that aside from standard JavaSE classes (which are already on the client) even stuff which is identical between two applets will get loaded individually by each one.
Although I suspect that military secrecy is highly overrated myself. In my experience in the defense industry what I observed was that secrecy was mainly a way of hiding greed and corruption. The projects I worked on weren't secret because it served any military purpose, they were secret because they were a giant waste of money.
Granted, if you want to fight a war, then you would pretty much require operational level military secrecy. So, hmmm, that might lead me to conclude that war in an open society is pretty much impossible. Can't really exactly see that as a disadvantage myself...;)
Disparity of power could be an issue. In my mind that is an argument for 'no half measures'. What I fear most is that by resisting openness tooth and nail we set the stage for exactly that scenario. The powerful will still gather massive amounts of information about the rest of us, but if we force them to do it covertly, and don't give ourselves the right to do the same back to them, then we've lost. Privacy IMHO IS dead, that isn't an issue anymore. The technology exists to learn virtually anything about anyone, and that technology WILL be used. It is useless to fight the hopeless battle of trying to undo that or deny its use to the powerful. The only question left open is whether or not the rest of us also get access. If we ourselves resist that, then we're our own worst enemies.
I have advanced a hypothesis that there can be benefits to giving up privacy. I am not trying to maintain that there is a single unalterable principle that says we should surrender all information about ourselves to everyone at all times (although one might make that case). Just that there is some (probably a great deal) of information we could benefit from sharing. Indeed anonymization may be a pretty good strategy.
It is all well and good, and I don't disparage people for being prudent, but I think we're doing ourselves and society in general a disservice if we simply reject the concept of openness out of hand.
There is another consideration as well. Sticking to one's guns to the bitter end seems all noble and romantic and all, but it is rarely the most prudent course of action. I thus advance the hypothesis that privacy, at least as we have known it in this country over the last couple of centuries is a dead letter. The choice is only between a hopeless and ultimately futile resistance to the inevitable, or a measured and thoughtful institution of mechanisms which could mitigate the possible harmful effects of living in the open. We can put up the noble resistance and we'll end up with a system where the information is shared in some secretive place somewhere out of the control of the public, or we can go ahead and create a reasonable set of rules by which the information can be shared in the open with some level of accountability and control. That may not be a terribly palatable position for me to take from the perspective of die hard libertarians, but reality always triumphs over principle...
Here, I'll give you an alternative analysis of your freedom/privacy formulation. Left to their own devices people tend to be secretive. Thus I would say that it is quite true that totalitarian societies don't respect privacy, but they by definition don't respect ANYTHING about individuals, so I can't see where you have established cause and effect. More like reversed it the way I see it.
Show me one example from history in which a free people freely gave up their privacy and that LED to a totalitarian state. Just one.
Its as simple as that. It is morally bankrupt and I have to say I see your position as both simplistic in the extreme and grossly myopic.
Nobody is claiming insurance companies aren't operating for profit, of course they are. So what? It is simply irrelevant. You have cast the whole question into some sort of zero sum equation where if they gain you loose. You'll have to do better than that.
I also disagree that privacy and freedom are inextricably entwined in such a way that a simplistic "if we have less privacy we have less freedom" is a justifiable position. Prove it.
If your theory of ethical behavior is nothing more than you blindly maximizing your own selfish interests then I pity you friend.
Slashdot Mirror
festering hunk of bad code? Yippee.
Honestly, Netscape Enterprise Server (in all its incarnations) was one of the worst servers I've ever had to misfortune to develop on and support.
The configuration system was TERRIBLE. The gui was worthless for all but the simplest setups, and if you hand edited ANYTHING (which you were virtually assured to have to do) then using the GUI would cause the whole configuration to become hopelessly corrupt. Worse the server didn't actually do things like CHECK its configuration, it would just operate in a completely erratic fashion.
As if THAT wasn't bad enough the thing NEVER became 100% stable. It was absolutely required to cluster at least 2-3 of these turkeys together to be sure that at least one would make it through any given 24 hour period in decent shape. We had 3 rebooting themselves every day on 8 hour offsets from each other. At least you could HOPE that 2 of them were actually functional at any given moment.
LiveScript was equally a boondoggle. Compared to what else was available at the time (early ASP, CGI scripts) it wasn't TOO bad, but javascript really was NOT up to building any kind of serious app. Just isn't possible to build a really large complex code base using it. I know, I tried...
Finally, the database integration was painful. Informix support kinda sorta worked. Oracle was maybe about 90% of the way there. There was no support for anything else, MAYBE Sybase. But you couldn't call a stored proc or anything beyond basic queries.
Later versions fixed some of the problems, but by the time it got even tolerably usable Apache was already light years ahead.
Network performance between different NICs and using the same NICs with different drivers, different settings, different switches, and different cabling can make a HUGE difference. One of my jobs is working on the design and build out of ticker plants for market data. We tend to hammer on networks REALLY hard!
There are several simple basic things that can easily vary which will make at least a 200% performance difference on either 100baseT or 1000baseT LANs.
For example a lot of card/switch combinations will fail to negotiate full duplex operation, that's a 50% performance hit right there.
Beyond that different cards have different amounts of intelligence and different amounts of buffering and DMA capabilities. Most drivers are generic chip set drivers, so they usually don't optimally set up the hardware. Different implementation bugs in either the card or the driver can also interact in various ways which can seriously degrade performance.
Overall I'd say that if you have a sufficient level of expertise with the drivers and the NIC you can pretty much always get SOME improvement in any given setup, and for the truly bad cases I've seen 3x better performance after tweaking on Linux.
ElcomSoft positions the software as a way to 'audit' wireless network security."
ElcomSoft positions the software as a way to 'audit'your neighbor's wireless network security."
It would be a VAST improvement if I could distribute RCP based applications with a single underlying UI toolkit. SWT is great, but whoever thinks their SWT based app will work cross platform without a LOT of tweaking, is insane ;).
You collaborationist you!
I really don't think you can compare a 3270 emulator based app to anything modern at all. Seems kind of irrelevant to me. That's 1980's vintage stuff, lol!
Pay levels certainly ARE related to overall business efficiency! It is ridiculous to claim that businesses with bad and inefficient processes are going to be able to pay as well as ones with good processes. They may HAVE to pay equally, and in that case they will FAIL and go out of business.
There may well be in many/most businesses more critical cost centers than IT, but every wasted dollar is wasted. If your business doesn't care about that, then they are stupid and someone is going to hand them their lunch one day in the probably not too distant future.
I also disagree that you have a more reliable infrastructure when you rely on a bunch of stand alone machines that have to be individually managed. Each and every one of those machines is a failure point, and when one fails you now have to spend all the time and energy rebuilding the whole thing to the proper configuration. Whereas in our diskless thin client environment you just send a guy down to swap out the broken terminal and in the mean time the employee can just log on at some other terminal in the interim.
Server side application availability is never a problem either. All application servers are running off a storage pool which has enough redundancy to achieve 100% uptime, and the actual server instances themselves are fairly meaningless, there is no data on them and the servers are either VMs or again machines that boot remote off the pool and can be replaced/failed over with usually no down time at all. The advantages are huge. In a 1000 years I would never even dream of going back.
Pretty much sounds to me like the place you're talking about is seriously behind the times and has some pretty crappy IT management practices (or more likely none at all). In my line of work if a line of business application was unavailable for 3 hours during market hours I'd be out on my ass by the end of the day!
Yeah, I totally disagree with that.
A company with a sensible and cost effective IT infrastructure has the advantage in business. So the choices are you can work for someone that can't pay you well and is always on the verge of being wiped out by the competition, or you can work for the one that leads its industry, pays well, and makes your job easier.
Thus I would argue that companies who stick to the old fashioned way of doing things based on some misguided idea that they are coddling their employees are dead ducks in the long run. Not only that but by having a crappy and unmanagable IT infrastructure they will actually be making the work environment less friendly and the lives of their staff more difficult.
99% of office workers in any case do not care about, nor even understand beyond a simple level what goes on to make their computer work right. They just want to sit down at the thing and do the job they are hired to do. They could not care less if the app they run is on their desktop or on a Citrix farm someplace or if it is a web app. And they have no clue or care about if their computer boots off a hard drive or the network.
What they DO care about is that their documents are accessible from any machine, that their settings and applications come up no matter where they log in, that their files are never lost forever, etc. Since these things are MUCH easier to achieve and can be done much cheaper in a more centralized IT infrastructure, that is what they will like to use.
Additionally departments are no longer so keen on controlling their own IT assets as they once were. 15 years ago a manager would think it made sense to 'own' his own desktop machines. Nowadays he'll have to care about security, data integrity, configuration management, etc. if he does that because modern businesses have learned to care about stuff like that. Today's manager would much rather leave that to the IT department budget than be distracted from his primary work to deal with it internally.
Granted there are plenty of companies with bad IT departments or no real clue about IT where the net result of centralization can easily be negative, but that is not a criticism of the superiority of the approach, it is just a bad implementation. In today's business environment a business that can't implement well, WILL eventually pay the price for that failing. It really isn't a choice anymore. Its a tough world out there and only the best are going to survive the next few years.
responses to that.
The trend towards reconsolidation of functionality in the back room and away from the client desktop only grows stronger with time.
The conditions under which fat 'client' PC computing originally appeared no longer pertain. I'll illustrate with an example. In the mid 80's I was working for an engineering firm. They had a few 1000 users, a LAN, a cluster of computers in the basement, and a dumb terminal on everyone's desk. Over the next 5 years disconnected PCs rapidly replaced a lot of these terminals for several reasons.
1) Networking PCs (or anything) was expensive, so if you NEEDED a PC, it was almost guaranteed not to be on the network.
2) People needed graphics capabilities and the ability to read data from floppies etc which were not possible with a dumb terminal in that day.
3) Department managers loved to control stuff, so of course they'd rather have a PC that was THEIRS and not a terminal, which 'belonged' to IT.
In every other respect the switch to PCs was negative overall. They were MUCH more expensive, required management, couldn't be backed up easily, and usually couldn't get access to resources on the network except via sneakernet.
Nowadays the 'positives' for PC/workstation fat client type machines are virtually gone. They WILL be networked and since x86 PC architecture is virtually ubiquitous there is no longer a distinction in capabilities between a PC and a 'terminal' (thin client). Furthermore the costs of unmanaged systems have finally begun to become fully appreciated. IT can't tolerate machines on the network they don't control and departments can't afford to or be bothered with dealing with the associated costs/risks themselves, so both IT and the client department would rather let IT manage things, and IT has no incentive not to then make everything a thin client.
Now, maybe the environment you work in is really backward and has not figured all this out yet. That's true with a lot of small businesses, but they are learning, and it is getting quite easy to provision network centric applications which often only require a web browser on the client side. So even the small businesses are less and less needing fat clients. I'll predict that no such thing will exist as a full up PC in business at all in 10 years. There will still be workstations for very specific uses, CAD or high end video/graphics work, but even those will mostly or even entirely utilize networked resources to boot and for storage.
In my business this sort of transition has already pretty much completed. The existing PCs are just old legacy hardware that will be replaced with diskless machines when they go end of life.
How many businesses do video and graphics work? Not many. I'd wager that not 1 in 10,000 business machines is used regularly for any CPU intensive task. Developers would definitely be somewhat of an exception, but there really aren't that many development groups out there doing compiles of 10+ million line code bases all day every day. I mean I can compile a Linux Kernel on my 2.4 ghz P4 machine (vintage 2004) in a few minutes as long as I have 2 gigs of RAM in it.
No, 99.9999% of all business machines don't need to be even as powerful as your average home PC, where someone might actually WANT to edit some video, etc. now and then. Those business machines run Office, Web Browser, Outlook, and maybe one or two other business apps.
In fact I would venture that business is where the desktop performance requirements are falling and will fall the fastest and furthest, and where energy efficiency makes the biggest difference. Any heavy lifting that needs to be done can always be moved to server side applications. There will always be a few high end workstations, but the average business PC is pretty close to being a diskless thin client now in any good shop, and that will be the norm within 3 years.
I agree, from what we know now it is probable that a fetus would not develop properly in zero g. Still, it hasn't been conclusively demonstrated, so I'd say the jury is out on that at least until someone sends some mice to the ISS and they determine what happens one way or the other.
Still, that problem doesn't really sound like too much of a deal breaker to me. Maybe mom has to spend some time in centripital gravity for a bit. Worst case you need a full 1g for the entire 9 months, which would be a hassle, but it could be as simple as a half hour a day for 3 weeks in .1 g. People would probably do that anyway for other reasons.
I still say the problems attendant with living on Mars, coupled with the utter lack of any good economic argument in favor of it, makes the idea of space colonies quite a bit more logical and appealing IMHO.
Wouldn't that gravity well be better on the biology of those living there than the microgravity associated with smaller rocky bodies?
What evidence is there to support that hypothesis? Granted, it is not far fetched, but we don't actually KNOW what
level of gravity has what effects. My guess would be that some effects might be mitigated, maybe even completely, others
might not be significantly reduced at all.
Plus, wouldn't even a thin atmosphere be better for protection and help reduce the need for vacuum-proof structures than near-vacuum conditions?
No, because the atmosphere of Mars is already close enough to a vacuum that from a physiological standpoint the
difference is irrelevant. The atmospheric pressure on the surface of Mars is 6 millibars, 1/150th of the pressure at
the surface of the Earth. From a standpoint of engineering a structure or breathing, it is no better than a vacuum. Yet
from the standpoint of carrying dust into everything and possibly facilitating corrosion and other equipment damage it
could prove to be quite a serious problem. So, I would, as an engineer, MUCH rather deal with the problems of the Lunar
environment than the Martian environment, since I will avoid all of those problems.
Wouldn't Mars also be more desirable because it has mostly cleared the neighborhood of other heavenly objects such that the risk of one's home being smashed into by another particularly large rock is massively diminshed?
Exactly how often do you think main belt asteroids collide with each other? On average not often at all. In fact such
collisions probably only happen once in many millions of years, possibly billions of years. Those bodies which were in orbits which were likely to collide with things mostly did so billions of years ago and were either sent into orbits where they no longer hit other stuff or were pounded to bits long ago. The chances of an asteroid hitting Mars are actually probably at least as high as those of one asteroid hitting another. Besides, if you have the technology to live on an asteroid, you can probably shift its orbit by a few 100 meters if you ever need to...
Wouldn't the fact of working in an environment with an up, a down, and other gravity-based rules like that which we have on Earth be easier for workers who have to do things like maintenance, construction, and the like be better than attempting to work in microgravity where accidently losing a tool means that it's probably gone forever instead of being able to just bend down and pick it up off the ground?
Oh, it would probably be easier for you or me right now today, no doubt. However zero g assembly IN GENERAL should be
quite easy. No need for massive cranes, scaffolds, support structures, etc. I highly suspect that once we are even 1/8th
as knowledgeable about zero g construction as we are about 1 g construction today we will have a much easier time with it.
Wouldn't it be fairly practical to bore down into Mars to construct a habitat with significantly less materials (like basically a cap at the top of the bore hole) such that materials from Earth aren't depleted nearly as much for space?
And why wouldn't this solution work equally well when dealing with an asteroid? In fact it seems to me it would work much better and be much easier. You don't have to DIG anything, just dump a whole lot of material around your habitat if thats what you need to do. No need to worry about tunneling or weight, etc. It
But just because nobody has YET solved the 'problem' of living in zero g doesn't mean it is insoluable. Doesn't even mean it is HARD to solve, just means we haven't figured it out yet. Not surprising, given the tiny amount of actual experience we have of humans living in zero g.
In fact, even the assertion that we can't live in zero g is open to serious question. Granted we know that people subjected to zero g for extended periods of time undergo certain physiological changes, none of those changes has yet proven to be life threatening. We don't know of any upper limit to the amount of time someone could live in zero g. In fact it would seem that if there is such a limit it must be at least several years.
I imagine between some type of exercise regimen, centripital gravity, and medication, it may well prove to be that people can live indefinitely in zero g without any serious problems, and quite possibly even reproduce successfully under those conditions.
Granted, this is all an unknown, but balanced against the HUGE excess cost of living on a planetary surface I think we'll be pretty motivated to find those answers if we ever do leave the Earth permanently. And if we CANNOT live indefinitely away from the surface of a planet? Then why would we not live on the surface of the Earth? With the resources of the whole Solar System at our disposal it would seem vastly less expensive and more pleasant than living on a cold, virtually airless low gravity world like Mars.
The 'real estate' value of Mars is always so totally overstated. NOBODY WILL EVER LIVE THERE. You want to know why?
1) Because it will make much more sense to live in free space (IE on an asteroid or space colony) where you avoid the huge energy cost of going up and down a gravity well.
2) Mars provides virtually nothing in the way of resources which are not available in places easier to get to.
3) The environment of Mars is actually MUCH harsher than the environment in space, and probably much harsher than the environment of the Moon. So why exactly would we so desire to live there?
4) If environments as harsh as Mars are desirable real estate for people to live on, then why aren't Antarctica and Green Land, and the Sahara Desert all chock full of people already? They are CERTAINLY much less harsh and much cheaper places to live. Good luck selling those Martian building lots...
5) Even speculating about Terraforming is pretty much beyond science. The time and energy inputs required are probably 1000's and maybe millions or billions of times anything we can deploy today. The time frame could easily range into the millions of years no matter how capable you are. There is certainly no sense at all in planning a space program based on a payoff that somehow relies on a technology that is no more than an idle dream which might exist in 200 or 1000 years, if ever.
This does all tie in to some extent to the OP, Mars' value is not ever going to be economic. Its value is purely scientific and there is no reasonable anticipation that it will ever be otherwise. Spoiling the pristine conditions on Mars would seriously degrade the value of exo-biology work done there in the future. So it IS a bad idea, and it would be a costly mistake.
Now, the question of the actual safety of Phobos-Grunt is a whole other thing. We'll just have to leave that to experts. At least they value the principle of avoiding contamination. Maybe they're a little biased, but the risk doesn't seem super excessive to me. OTOH it also sounds like the experiment itself is mostly a PR stunt, so on that basis I'd give it the thumbs down. Not worth making a huge stink about though.
Sure, if you want to pay something like $800 a month for your internet access you can bypass Fairpoint by purchasing an entire T1. I suppose if you just want say 512k bandwidth you could get a fractional T and maybe pay oh only like $250 a month! What a deal!
Oh, and of course don't forget, now you'll need to purchase a nice expensive router/dsu/csu instead of going with the standard cheap consumer stuff.
I'm thrilled, that's a really amazing alternative, lol! Granted the service will be somewhat higher quality than DSL/cable, but I hardly think you can really consider commercial data services as an equivalent replacement for retail grade service.
Verizon can't even provide me with reliable VOICE service. EvDO here is pretty worthless. In any case even if it worked fine your talking FAR less bandwidth and MUCH greater latency. There really is no comparison. Had satellite service for a while and that was a joke too.
Not saying nothing will ever come along, but at least up here in Vermont (and I'm in the most populated area of the state) there are 2 viable choices, Comcast, and Fairpoint.
Uh, I'm a Fairpoint DSL customer right now myself. They are WAY WAY cheaper (still around $50 a month for naked "high speed" DSL) than the amazing plethora of one other choice, the cable co, which is even more predatory (well, maybe not anymore) than the telco.
So, for the blessings of actually being able TO HAVE STINKING EMAIL I'll have to now pay what, about $80 a month? Lovely.
BTW, I've written everyone down thar 'n flatland, but I aren't holdin my breath... (still, I urge all to do the same).
Yeah, it seemed kind of like that to me too, lol.
And hey, my Yog-Sothoth beats your Arioch! ;)
I can see the comparisons to Heinlien, but OMW really struck me as being very much in the same vein as The Forever War.
Great writer though, so definitely worth checking out anything he writes.
That ant farm I have in the basement MIGHT want to go onto Craigslist real soon now too!
Our new robotic ant overlords ;)
All applets run in the same JVM. This has ALWAYS been true. Each one has its own isolated class loaders and the security manager isolates threads, etc., but your browser will not start multiple JVMs.
That being said, the class loader isolation does mean that aside from standard JavaSE classes (which are already on the client) even stuff which is identical between two applets will get loaded individually by each one.
Although I suspect that military secrecy is highly overrated myself. In my experience in the defense industry what I observed was that secrecy was mainly a way of hiding greed and corruption. The projects I worked on weren't secret because it served any military purpose, they were secret because they were a giant waste of money.
Granted, if you want to fight a war, then you would pretty much require operational level military secrecy. So, hmmm, that might lead me to conclude that war in an open society is pretty much impossible. Can't really exactly see that as a disadvantage myself... ;)
Disparity of power could be an issue. In my mind that is an argument for 'no half measures'. What I fear most is that by resisting openness tooth and nail we set the stage for exactly that scenario. The powerful will still gather massive amounts of information about the rest of us, but if we force them to do it covertly, and don't give ourselves the right to do the same back to them, then we've lost. Privacy IMHO IS dead, that isn't an issue anymore. The technology exists to learn virtually anything about anyone, and that technology WILL be used. It is useless to fight the hopeless battle of trying to undo that or deny its use to the powerful. The only question left open is whether or not the rest of us also get access. If we ourselves resist that, then we're our own worst enemies.
I have advanced a hypothesis that there can be benefits to giving up privacy. I am not trying to maintain that there is a single unalterable principle that says we should surrender all information about ourselves to everyone at all times (although one might make that case). Just that there is some (probably a great deal) of information we could benefit from sharing. Indeed anonymization may be a pretty good strategy.
It is all well and good, and I don't disparage people for being prudent, but I think we're doing ourselves and society in general a disservice if we simply reject the concept of openness out of hand.
There is another consideration as well. Sticking to one's guns to the bitter end seems all noble and romantic and all, but it is rarely the most prudent course of action. I thus advance the hypothesis that privacy, at least as we have known it in this country over the last couple of centuries is a dead letter. The choice is only between a hopeless and ultimately futile resistance to the inevitable, or a measured and thoughtful institution of mechanisms which could mitigate the possible harmful effects of living in the open. We can put up the noble resistance and we'll end up with a system where the information is shared in some secretive place somewhere out of the control of the public, or we can go ahead and create a reasonable set of rules by which the information can be shared in the open with some level of accountability and control. That may not be a terribly palatable position for me to take from the perspective of die hard libertarians, but reality always triumphs over principle...
Cite a 'historical fact'.
Here, I'll give you an alternative analysis of your freedom/privacy formulation. Left to their own devices people tend to be secretive. Thus I would say that it is quite true that totalitarian societies don't respect privacy, but they by definition don't respect ANYTHING about individuals, so I can't see where you have established cause and effect. More like reversed it the way I see it.
Show me one example from history in which a free people freely gave up their privacy and that LED to a totalitarian state. Just one.
Its as simple as that. It is morally bankrupt and I have to say I see your position as both simplistic in the extreme and grossly myopic.
Nobody is claiming insurance companies aren't operating for profit, of course they are. So what? It is simply irrelevant. You have cast the whole question into some sort of zero sum equation where if they gain you loose. You'll have to do better than that.
I also disagree that privacy and freedom are inextricably entwined in such a way that a simplistic "if we have less privacy we have less freedom" is a justifiable position. Prove it.
If your theory of ethical behavior is nothing more than you blindly maximizing your own selfish interests then I pity you friend.