I've often wondered, given the massive amounts of research going into power distribution systems these days, why this energy can't be used in some way. Nuclear reactors, after all, work by heating water. If you could preheat the water using the recently-produced waste, you wouldn't need to drive the main reactor quite so high.
It isn't like they are running new cold water through the system for each cycle. They run water that has already been heated from one cycle back into the system. So whatever heat you could get from the waste nuclear material wouldn't be very useful. The water is already hot.
So I'm not really sure what your experience is or why it should be so different than mine
Well, even if one vendor isn't as a popular... No -- it doesn't make sense to me.
And it isn't just Dells. My PC at home (Shuttle) doesn't boot USB either. These are many other examples that I can't verify at the moment.
No, I mean booting using the harddrive/OS on another computer. Not netbooting or serving out a disk image via USB.
This is somewhat of a grey line in my opinion, one can achieve the same results if one set it up that way.
Maybe, but the point is that with Macs you don't have to set anything up. It Just Works that way by design. You can boot off another person's HD or you can just use their computer as an external Firewire harddrive. Say your friend has a computer that won't boot and you don't have a Live CD or other utiilty disk handy. You can boot his computer up while holding "T" key and attach it to your computer as a Firewire drive. You can run disk utilities on it, fix broken/missing files, whatever. Or maybe you just want to augment your local storage with another computer without bothering with file sharing and networks and such.
Sorry, I don't mean to sound like such a Mac fanboy, but after spending 20 years dealing with PC hackery, it is a relief to work with systems that are designed (mostly) right the first time and not full of decades of legacy crap. I have absolutely no desire to go back and I feel sorry for people stuck in the Windows Quagmire.
Actually, I'd probably use VMware Player on a portable drive. Simple and elegant. Kinda like booting Macs off various media.;-)
Good idea, although I don't it would work too well on locked down workstations (non-administrator access)
Somehow I doubt the BullDog thing would work much better. I imagine it requires some local software to take control over the video/keyboard or whatever it does.
Good luck getting it to boot reliably. I tried making a Linux on USB system and found that, even though it would technically support the hardware, many PCs just didn't have the option to boot it.
Not my experience.
Well, I just verified that our Dell Dimensions (Pentium 4 machines) don't have a USB boot option. So that means that 95%, if not 100% (I haven't checked the few oddballs and laptops), of the PCs here cannot boot from USB. I know my home computer (P4 2Ghz) doesn't have the option either. At my previous employer it was hit and miss. Some computers could boot USB, but most couldn't. So I'm not really sure what your experience is or why it should be so different than mine. Is USB booting only common in the last year or two? Maybe the PCs I use are just now new enough.. but I think this is pretty common. Most computers are not as new as one or two years.
The only way to get a reliable PC boot media is to use CD/DVD but then writing persistent data and maintenance become a pain.
Also not my experience, often I come across CD/DVD-roms that just mess up reading some CDs, while the same CDs work fine in others (nothing todo with burn speeds), I've also had this issue on Mac hardware.
This is certainly far more rare than PCs that cannot boot USB. Perhaps I should have said "the most reliable PC boot media..."
I've booted standard x86 systems off Ethernet and USB using another PC -- I do admit it isn't as easy to setup though.
No, I mean booting using the harddrive/OS on another computer. Not netbooting or serving out a disk image via USB.
And even then, there is a good chance that Windows will simply refuse to boot on anything but the machine it was installed on.
Strange, the worst I've seen is that Windows asks you to reactivate it, but you can still use the computer despite that message.
Unless you specifically tweak the machine, differeing HAL setups will cause bluescreen last I checked.
Yes, but it is mostly a utility, not a general pupose computing device.
By the way, ever heard of Blackdog? So far I think it's the 'neatest' way to take a mobile desktop with you -- although I haven't bought one yet, so I can't say this is a opinion drawn from experience.
Actually, I'd probably use VMware Player on a portable drive. Simple and elegant. Kinda like booting Macs off various media.;-)
So I guess that only works with authenticated users. We have a truely open network so there is no way to group users and give each their own 128k. Oh well.
Solution: We talked the hotel into getting a D-LINK DSA-3100. I had it installed in an afternoon, the hotel had a captive portal to boot, and everyone got a smaller but much fairer share of the bandwidth.
I recently installed a DSA-3200 (the successor to the 3100) and I can't figure out how to make usage fair. I can limit the overal bandwidth used for each authentication group, which is great because we use our T1s for other things besides wireless, but how do I limit bandwitdh per protocol or make usage fair? Did you just take the problem user(s) and put them on their own group? As far as I can tell, a single user can still hog the limited amount of bandwidth for the group.
Hopefully the 3100 didn't have features that were left out in the 3200.;-P
Didn't AMD come out with tagged TLB? I was reading some Xen docs that suggested running Xen certain AMD CPUs would improve performance because of the tagged TLB.
You're right; of course it does. Right now, you would be hard pressed to find a machine running Xen. I expect this to change soon, however. Vista is supposed to support Xen guests out of the box, and many free operating systems already have this as an option.
Seems to me that VMware Player would be more practical. At least it is easier to set up.
In my experience, though, the real value of having a portable, bootable system is for utility rather than general purpose use. That is, you want to boot systems that are not currently working or are infected or whatever. Most people will do just fine with a USB memory stick containing important files and such. And if you have a Mac, you can even throw your favorite apps on it and run them from there. No admin rights required. MS Office for Mac, for example, doesn't even need to be installed. You can run it directly from external media. Just drag the Office folder from your/Applications folder to the media...
You can boot Windows off a iPod or any other USB device too. To be able todo this simply, one usually gets WinPE [runtime.org] and the few of it's many plugins that lets it boot off USB devices.
Good luck getting it to boot reliably. I tried making a Linux on USB system and found that, even though it would technically support the hardware, many PCs just didn't have the option to boot it. The only way to get a reliable PC boot media is to use CD/DVD but then writing persistent data and maintenance become a pain.
Actually windows isn't... Infact there are options in Windows that let you setup multiple hardware profiles, so when you boot you can be asked which specific profile you want to use... Or you can just use one profile like most people do and have all the hardware supported under that.
"Most people"? I have never once, in my 12 years of PC tech experience, seen someone use such a setup on with a PC. Maybe when building Ghost images, but even that is tricky. If it is so simple to setup, why does every Windows tech I hve ever known use a DOS boot disk/CD to run virus scanners, Ghost, and the like? For "most people," a portable, bootable "Windows" system means a DOS floppy image with an NTFS driver or the XP install media... and sometimes a Linux Live CD when Windows won't work. Maybe in theory you can get Windows to to boot on a significant subset of PCs off of USB, but only in the Mac world is it common practice.
Also, did you know that you can boot one Mac off of another Mac acting as as an external Firewire drive? No need to carry around an iPod or build special boot disks. Just boot one computer off of the drive of another. I've used this trick many times. You can't do anything even remotely like this on a PC without physically moving drives around. And even then, there is a good chance that Windows will simply refuse to boot on anything but the machine it was installed on.
Well, there is no supported proprietary Windows OS solution for PPC anymore. Plus PPC systems seem to be dying. I some how doubt your iPod would boot my PPC Amiga though (can run Linux and AmigaOS fine though). The other thing is, don't you have to crack MacOSX for it to boot on most Intel machines -- and even then, it doesn't generally support the hardware that well from what I've heard.
WTF are you talking about? What does you rusting Amiga have to do with anything? And why would I want to boot Intel OS X on a PC when I have a workplace and home full of Macs?
By the way, have you found any noticeable speed differences when running the OS off the iPod?
Yes, but it is mostly a utility, not a general pupose computing device. A firewire drive (yeah, Macs can boot those too) is drive a lot faster though. I could see myself using that, although 95% of the (computing) time I am using one of two computers. Any files that really need to be shared are either under version control or on a server that I can mount via VPN.
Almost every PC bios used in the last 3 or 4 years supports booting from USB.
Not in my experience. Some claim to but don't do it corrently (or consistently). Some will boot USB memory stick, but not a disk, for example. It is hit an miss.
Even if this 1/3 number you claim was correct, there are still 10s of millions more PC's in the world capable of booting from USB then there are Macs that can boot from USB. Meaning if you walk around and pick any computer you see at random (MAC or PC), you will find magnatudes more PCs capable of booting from USB.
True, but I'd rather KNOW that my media will boot on a set of systems rather than just cross my fingers and hope. I guess it really depends on whether or not you find yourself in a Mac centric environment. For regular Mac users in certain environments, bootable external media is (and has been for many years) very useful for a wide range of purposes. My experience as a PC tech/user has been that Live Linux systems are of limited usefulness in comparison. Mostly because you end up defaulting to CD to catch all of the systems you might boot and writing data becomes a pain.
Doesn't that require any machine you plug into to have Xen all configured and ready to resume a virtual machine? How many machines like that are you likely to bump into outside of your home?
Problem is that PCs often have trouble booting off of anything but CD/DVD, HD, or floppy. I put together a whole Linux system on a USB memory stick hoping that I would have a Linux system wherever I went, but I found that only like 1/3 the PCs I tried coudl actually boot it. Wasn't very useful at all.
With Macs you can boot any machine with just about any common media. I've seen people carry around bootable systems on their iPod. Can even make that system universal so it can boot both Intell and PPC.
You can boot a Mac off of an iPod. I know carrying around a whole system on your iPod is a bit of a waste of valuable music storage space, but it is possible. OS X isn't like Windows where the OS is tied to a particular hardware configuration. It is nearly one size fits all with OS X. You can even make a universal system that will boot either an PPC or Intel machine (I've done it). You could easily write scripts to synhronize your desktop with your iPod. I believe Carbon Copy Cloner will do it. Although I haven't used it in a while.
Having your home directory wherever you go is one thing, but how about all your apps too?
Macs are so nice to work with compared to PCs. I can't believe it took me 10 years to figure it out.
More effective, how? I'm hardly an expert on kernel design (although I have taken an OS design class), but what is wrong with the way context switching is done today? I wasn't under the impression that it was a problem unless you're trying to do too many switches in a short amount of time.
More effective paging and virtual memory support?
Again, what is wrong with the way it is done now?
Better SMP onchip support?
Do you mean you want the chip to guess how to prioritize and distribute theads/processes? I'm pretty sure this is best left to the OS.
It would be great if the new cheap were designed with operating systems and end users in mind. There is a number of things that would be much better if the CPU supported some special instruction. Every OS class student has been tought this.
Such as? Users get the virtualization instruction and SSE3. Do you have more special instructions in mind?
I'd be more than willing to pay an extra $2 for the convenience of packaging and burning to disc. I mean, I'd probably do it anyway myself if I downloaded it. The blank media itself nearly takes up that $2. I say a $2 difference isn't enough to make the download time, time burning, and media worth it. The brick and mortar stores are actually getting a pretty good deal.
Although I don't find myself buying movies at brick and mortar stores. If I'm really going to buy a movie (pretty rare) I'll just order it from Amazon or something. Usually it is for a gift. I don't see much point in owning movies except for the few really great ones that you might actually watch more than once or twice. But even then, repeat viewing loses its appeal as I get older.
but for such small numbers freezing is probably OK.
Since when is freezing a viable method of suspended animation? We can't freeze a body without causing massive cellular damage. And even if you could, how would you revive it from such a state?
Sadly, there are still quite a number of people still running Windows older than XP which will never run IE7. I don't have the figures handly, but I imagine it is somewhere around 30%. So unless you want to alienate a good chunk of users, you'll have to continue supporting IE6 (and maybe even IE5.5) for several years to come.
I disagree. Software As A Service has not as-yet clear boundaries, so perhaps both definitions apply.
No, you are wrong. Both definiton do not apply. There are some very good examples of SAAS today. This isn't some yet to be realized model where nobody really knows how it will work.
When you paint it as the fear-mongering, DRM-laden "you don't touch the box" version, it's a bit of a stretch from today. I don't think folks would like to wait for each piece of software to download each time they click on an icon.
Which is why I think wide scale adoption of SAAS is a long way off. Web browsers, the most common delivery mechanism for SAAS, simply isn't up to the task of delivering rich applications as a service. There are exceptions, of course, such as Email and Google Maps, but traditional, locally installed products that you control such as MS Office and Photoshop are here to stay. Even if they do time-bomb the licenses.
I see software as local, pulled down in persistent modules, with only it's accessability managed by-wire. This means that it may exist, but cannot be run (without hacking) because it needs to check with a remote server. This is perhaps where we diverge, and thats ok with me.
That is DRM, not SAAS.
SAAS to me simply means you pay for a time-period of software usage - you're renting it instead of buying it. How all that occurs is up for debate, but the models of doing it in small checks or large downloads (ug) is no different.
That is software by subscription, not SAAS.
All my other examples were trying to point out pieces of tech that already use similar models. You deny it as loud as you want, but in fact they apply: Each is an example of downloading and installing permanent or temporary pieces of software under sort implied license. Time-bombing the license, setting up a recurring fee, and pushing updates in the background via a service are the next steps. We'll see what parts of the market embrace it.
Perhaps all your examples show how one might ultimately deliver a software service, but they do not constitute SAAS in and of themesleves. There are plenty of good examples of SAAS in action today and they don't resemble your examples.
Overall, the model isn't much different to how most Linux distros work, or how I choose the cygwin image I like per box I want to configure. The SAAS model simply ties that "menu of downloads" to the concepts on the application menu live. Imagine if cygwin had an app to research and acquire/install further apps from the command line. This is the same concept, except tied to a market model where money is paid for such acquisitions. I research "function lookup" and see flavors of ctag() offered. If my connection is configured, it simply downloads it and installs it. No big deal. This is how I maintain BSD now.
The way packages are selected and downloaded in Linux or BSD has absolutely nothing to do with SAAS. Nothing. Zilch. Nada. As long as you are the one doing the installation and management and adminitration, it is a product, not a service. Now, if instead of installing BSD, you just paid someone for the privilige of SSH'ing to another box where you ran unix commands, that would be SAAS. But as long as you are managing the box yourself, it is not a service.
All programs are supposed to "behave accordingly" - and ones that don't are usually classified as malware. For example, if a program accesses the network without explicitly saying so, or needing to for the type of program it is (would you be surprised if calculator accessed the web?) - then it "isn't behaving." The significance is that if a program is updating itself in the background without the user's knowledge (many do already), then we're changing the market model.
This has absolutely nothign to do with bittorrent. A bittorrent client does not "update itself" in the background. It just downloads/uploads files that you tell it to with the parameters that you give it (max upload/download speeds, etc). Just like an FTP client. Its just peer to peer and not client/server. This has nothing to do with SAAS and you are confusing your point by even bringing it up at all.
Now imagine a core MS Excel without most of the bloat. I dynamically get the drawing package, dictionary/thesaurus, ODBC connectivity, and scripting package for a price, hooked to that Excel install. I'm not sure what issues you have with that, except ranting about DRM. If I cleanly unregister those packages via the software/network, I can use my account to put them elsewhere.
But MS Office is already modularized to a significant degree. Try doing a "custom" install of Office. You can (de)select all kinds of things. You don't have to install the whole office suite. You can pick and choose the components you install. The only difference is that it isn't downloaded. It comes off the CD. If you could download office components, that wouldn't change the software model any. It is still a product and not a service.
Even if you paid for the individual components (either downloaded or installed from media), that still wouldn't be Software As A Service. That would be tiered pricing. How you GET those tiers delivered to your machine is totally irrelevent. Tiered pricing models and SAAS are NOT the same thing. You seem to think they are.
SAAS is something different. SAAS means that you don't even install applications on your machine at all. SAAS means that you don't own a copy of the program. You own a subscription to a service. The specific software that the service uses is mostly irrelevent as long as it does what you pay the service to do. In aservice model, the vendor delivers the application on demand. This is most commonly done through the web browser but can also be done with terminal apps (the medical industry still uses 'em) or Citrix or are set-top-box on your TV or whatever. The point being that you dont' manage it at all. In a fully SAAS world, you wouldn't even have administrator access to you own computer. You wouldn't need it. Whoever you bought your software service from would manage it for you because you are no longer paying for the product... just the service. Now, they could choose to tier their service and have you pay for individual components, but that doesn't really affect whether or not it is SAAS.
If I'm not mistaken, torrent pieces are distributed without explicit knowledge of the machine owner. This means, in effect, each machine has dedicated a "sandbox" to be managed by the node software
How are you defining a "sandbox?" I don't get it. Why is it significant that the machine owner doesn't know exactly what is going on with the torrent pieces? How many programs let you know exactly what is going on behind the scenes?
Locally stored software is exactly what I'm talking about. Don't confuse Software As A Service with the concept of download on demand. I'm not not saying any of this is revolutionary, quite the opposite. I'm stating that SAAS is a concept that simply hasn't been standardized/commoditized yet, but will be. We're not far from it already.
You haven't really made clear what makes this locally stored SAAS any different than what we have now. Does it mean that I will have to pay to activate/use software that I've already installed? Like Will pay a monthy fee to run MS Office... or perhaps pay per hour of use or per character typed or something? Sounds like DRM gone mad to me.
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It isn't like they are running new cold water through the system for each cycle. They run water that has already been heated from one cycle back into the system. So whatever heat you could get from the waste nuclear material wouldn't be very useful. The water is already hot.
-matthew
And it isn't just Dells. My PC at home (Shuttle) doesn't boot USB either. These are many other examples that I can't verify at the moment.
Maybe, but the point is that with Macs you don't have to set anything up. It Just Works that way by design. You can boot off another person's HD or you can just use their computer as an external Firewire harddrive. Say your friend has a computer that won't boot and you don't have a Live CD or other utiilty disk handy. You can boot his computer up while holding "T" key and attach it to your computer as a Firewire drive. You can run disk utilities on it, fix broken/missing files, whatever. Or maybe you just want to augment your local storage with another computer without bothering with file sharing and networks and such.
Sorry, I don't mean to sound like such a Mac fanboy, but after spending 20 years dealing with PC hackery, it is a relief to work with systems that are designed (mostly) right the first time and not full of decades of legacy crap. I have absolutely no desire to go back and I feel sorry for people stuck in the Windows Quagmire.
Somehow I doubt the BullDog thing would work much better. I imagine it requires some local software to take control over the video/keyboard or whatever it does.
-matthew
Well, I just verified that our Dell Dimensions (Pentium 4 machines) don't have a USB boot option. So that means that 95%, if not 100% (I haven't checked the few oddballs and laptops), of the PCs here cannot boot from USB. I know my home computer (P4 2Ghz) doesn't have the option either. At my previous employer it was hit and miss. Some computers could boot USB, but most couldn't. So I'm not really sure what your experience is or why it should be so different than mine. Is USB booting only common in the last year or two? Maybe the PCs I use are just now new enough.. but I think this is pretty common. Most computers are not as new as one or two years.
This is certainly far more rare than PCs that cannot boot USB. Perhaps I should have said "the most reliable PC boot media..."
No, I mean booting using the harddrive/OS on another computer. Not netbooting or serving out a disk image via USB.
Unless you specifically tweak the machine, differeing HAL setups will cause bluescreen last I checked.
Actually, I'd probably use VMware Player on a portable drive. Simple and elegant. Kinda like booting Macs off various media.
-matthew
So I guess that only works with authenticated users. We have a truely open network so there is no way to group users and give each their own 128k. Oh well.
-matthew
I recently installed a DSA-3200 (the successor to the 3100) and I can't figure out how to make usage fair. I can limit the overal bandwidth used for each authentication group, which is great because we use our T1s for other things besides wireless, but how do I limit bandwitdh per protocol or make usage fair? Did you just take the problem user(s) and put them on their own group? As far as I can tell, a single user can still hog the limited amount of bandwidth for the group.
Hopefully the 3100 didn't have features that were left out in the 3200.
-matthew
Are you suggesting Pluto was adopted?
-matthew
Didn't AMD come out with tagged TLB? I was reading some Xen docs that suggested running Xen certain AMD CPUs would improve performance because of the tagged TLB.
-matthew
Seems to me that VMware Player would be more practical. At least it is easier to set up.
In my experience, though, the real value of having a portable, bootable system is for utility rather than general purpose use. That is, you want to boot systems that are not currently working or are infected or whatever. Most people will do just fine with a USB memory stick containing important files and such. And if you have a Mac, you can even throw your favorite apps on it and run them from there. No admin rights required. MS Office for Mac, for example, doesn't even need to be installed. You can run it directly from external media. Just drag the Office folder from your
-matthew
Good luck getting it to boot reliably. I tried making a Linux on USB system and found that, even though it would technically support the hardware, many PCs just didn't have the option to boot it. The only way to get a reliable PC boot media is to use CD/DVD but then writing persistent data and maintenance become a pain.
"Most people"? I have never once, in my 12 years of PC tech experience, seen someone use such a setup on with a PC. Maybe when building Ghost images, but even that is tricky. If it is so simple to setup, why does every Windows tech I hve ever known use a DOS boot disk/CD to run virus scanners, Ghost, and the like? For "most people," a portable, bootable "Windows" system means a DOS floppy image with an NTFS driver or the XP install media... and sometimes a Linux Live CD when Windows won't work. Maybe in theory you can get Windows to to boot on a significant subset of PCs off of USB, but only in the Mac world is it common practice.
Also, did you know that you can boot one Mac off of another Mac acting as as an external Firewire drive? No need to carry around an iPod or build special boot disks. Just boot one computer off of the drive of another. I've used this trick many times. You can't do anything even remotely like this on a PC without physically moving drives around. And even then, there is a good chance that Windows will simply refuse to boot on anything but the machine it was installed on.
WTF are you talking about? What does you rusting Amiga have to do with anything? And why would I want to boot Intel OS X on a PC when I have a workplace and home full of Macs?
Yes, but it is mostly a utility, not a general pupose computing device. A firewire drive (yeah, Macs can boot those too) is drive a lot faster though. I could see myself using that, although 95% of the (computing) time I am using one of two computers. Any files that really need to be shared are either under version control or on a server that I can mount via VPN.
-matthew
Not in my experience. Some claim to but don't do it corrently (or consistently). Some will boot USB memory stick, but not a disk, for example. It is hit an miss.
True, but I'd rather KNOW that my media will boot on a set of systems rather than just cross my fingers and hope. I guess it really depends on whether or not you find yourself in a Mac centric environment. For regular Mac users in certain environments, bootable external media is (and has been for many years) very useful for a wide range of purposes. My experience as a PC tech/user has been that Live Linux systems are of limited usefulness in comparison. Mostly because you end up defaulting to CD to catch all of the systems you might boot and writing data becomes a pain.
-matthew
Doesn't that require any machine you plug into to have Xen all configured and ready to resume a virtual machine? How many machines like that are you likely to bump into outside of your home?
-matthew
Problem is that PCs often have trouble booting off of anything but CD/DVD, HD, or floppy. I put together a whole Linux system on a USB memory stick hoping that I would have a Linux system wherever I went, but I found that only like 1/3 the PCs I tried coudl actually boot it. Wasn't very useful at all.
With Macs you can boot any machine with just about any common media. I've seen people carry around bootable systems on their iPod. Can even make that system universal so it can boot both Intell and PPC.
-matthew
You can boot a Mac off of an iPod. I know carrying around a whole system on your iPod is a bit of a waste of valuable music storage space, but it is possible. OS X isn't like Windows where the OS is tied to a particular hardware configuration. It is nearly one size fits all with OS X. You can even make a universal system that will boot either an PPC or Intel machine (I've done it). You could easily write scripts to synhronize your desktop with your iPod. I believe Carbon Copy Cloner will do it. Although I haven't used it in a while.
Having your home directory wherever you go is one thing, but how about all your apps too?
Macs are so nice to work with compared to PCs. I can't believe it took me 10 years to figure it out.
-matthew
More effective context switch?
More effective, how? I'm hardly an expert on kernel design (although I have taken an OS design class), but what is wrong with the way context switching is done today? I wasn't under the impression that it was a problem unless you're trying to do too many switches in a short amount of time.
More effective paging and virtual memory support?
Again, what is wrong with the way it is done now?
Better SMP onchip support?
Do you mean you want the chip to guess how to prioritize and distribute theads/processes? I'm pretty sure this is best left to the OS.
-matthew
Even worse. Then you have to wait for it to load when you scroll through.
Such as? Users get the virtualization instruction and SSE3. Do you have more special instructions in mind?
-matthew
Moe: This baby can flash-fry a buffalo in 40 seconds!
Homer: 40 seconds? Oooo, but I want it now!
18G of movie (HD-DVD/Blu-Ray) can't play on "standard equipment" either.
-matthew
I'd be more than willing to pay an extra $2 for the convenience of packaging and burning to disc. I mean, I'd probably do it anyway myself if I downloaded it. The blank media itself nearly takes up that $2. I say a $2 difference isn't enough to make the download time, time burning, and media worth it. The brick and mortar stores are actually getting a pretty good deal.
Although I don't find myself buying movies at brick and mortar stores. If I'm really going to buy a movie (pretty rare) I'll just order it from Amazon or something. Usually it is for a gift. I don't see much point in owning movies except for the few really great ones that you might actually watch more than once or twice. But even then, repeat viewing loses its appeal as I get older.
-matthew
Since when is freezing a viable method of suspended animation? We can't freeze a body without causing massive cellular damage. And even if you could, how would you revive it from such a state?
-matthew
Sadly, there are still quite a number of people still running Windows older than XP which will never run IE7. I don't have the figures handly, but I imagine it is somewhere around 30%. So unless you want to alienate a good chunk of users, you'll have to continue supporting IE6 (and maybe even IE5.5) for several years to come.
-matthew
Trust me, you *don't* want your BT viewership counted.
No, you are wrong. Both definiton do not apply. There are some very good examples of SAAS today. This isn't some yet to be realized model where nobody really knows how it will work.
Which is why I think wide scale adoption of SAAS is a long way off. Web browsers, the most common delivery mechanism for SAAS, simply isn't up to the task of delivering rich applications as a service. There are exceptions, of course, such as Email and Google Maps, but traditional, locally installed products that you control such as MS Office and Photoshop are here to stay. Even if they do time-bomb the licenses.
That is DRM, not SAAS.
That is software by subscription, not SAAS.
Perhaps all your examples show how one might ultimately deliver a software service, but they do not constitute SAAS in and of themesleves. There are plenty of good examples of SAAS in action today and they don't resemble your examples.
-matthew
The way packages are selected and downloaded in Linux or BSD has absolutely nothing to do with SAAS. Nothing. Zilch. Nada. As long as you are the one doing the installation and management and adminitration, it is a product, not a service. Now, if instead of installing BSD, you just paid someone for the privilige of SSH'ing to another box where you ran unix commands, that would be SAAS. But as long as you are managing the box yourself, it is not a service.
This has absolutely nothign to do with bittorrent. A bittorrent client does not "update itself" in the background. It just downloads/uploads files that you tell it to with the parameters that you give it (max upload/download speeds, etc). Just like an FTP client. Its just peer to peer and not client/server. This has nothing to do with SAAS and you are confusing your point by even bringing it up at all.
But MS Office is already modularized to a significant degree. Try doing a "custom" install of Office. You can (de)select all kinds of things. You don't have to install the whole office suite. You can pick and choose the components you install. The only difference is that it isn't downloaded. It comes off the CD. If you could download office components, that wouldn't change the software model any. It is still a product and not a service.
Even if you paid for the individual components (either downloaded or installed from media), that still wouldn't be Software As A Service. That would be tiered pricing. How you GET those tiers delivered to your machine is totally irrelevent. Tiered pricing models and SAAS are NOT the same thing. You seem to think they are.
SAAS is something different. SAAS means that you don't even install applications on your machine at all. SAAS means that you don't own a copy of the program. You own a subscription to a service. The specific software that the service uses is mostly irrelevent as long as it does what you pay the service to do. In aservice model, the vendor delivers the application on demand. This is most commonly done through the web browser but can also be done with terminal apps (the medical industry still uses 'em) or Citrix or are set-top-box on your TV or whatever. The point being that you dont' manage it at all. In a fully SAAS world, you wouldn't even have administrator access to you own computer. You wouldn't need it. Whoever you bought your software service from would manage it for you because you are no longer paying for the product... just the service. Now, they could choose to tier their service and have you pay for individual components, but that doesn't really affect whether or not it is SAAS.
-matthew
How are you defining a "sandbox?" I don't get it. Why is it significant that the machine owner doesn't know exactly what is going on with the torrent pieces? How many programs let you know exactly what is going on behind the scenes?
You haven't really made clear what makes this locally stored SAAS any different than what we have now. Does it mean that I will have to pay to activate/use software that I've already installed? Like Will pay a monthy fee to run MS Office... or perhaps pay per hour of use or per character typed or something? Sounds like DRM gone mad to me.
No thanks. I hope it never catches on.
-matthew