Good grief; don't any of these fifth-rate excuses for journalists know basic math? Twenty seconds with a pencil and paper would tell anyone with the brains that God gave a radish that such a short recharge cycle would require a power connection bigger around than the car itself. :P
Microsoft could stamp their logo on a soggy bag of fermented doggy doo-doo and the lusers would still queue-up a line six blocks long to buy it. *sigh*
The architecture you're describing is too complicated and bandwidth-intensive.
Try this instead: Have the virtual machines up and running on one or more high-performance servers. The users have thin-client terminal units (Wyse, maybe) that bootstrap from the network, then initiate a RDP-based session with one of the virtual machines. The user logs into the virtual machine, and merrily pecks away.
"By August, almost all of HP's IT employees will have to work in one of 25 designated offices during most of the week. Those who don't wish to make this change will be out of work without severance pay."
And the beatings will continue until morale improves.
Yay! There's buzz-phrase #1. That's because the 'The Rich' (dramatic music plays) have this annoying habit of turning situations to their advantage, rather than sitting around whining about them.
"....the shareholder is valued more than the employee,...."
Well, then buy stock. Last I checked, it's still legal to do that.
"....jobs are eliminated in the name of bottom-line efficiency...."
Yup; and where they won't, or more commonly can't due to union rules, they eventually end up in bankruptcy, or teetering on the edge of it. Check the news on General Motors/Delphi/the steel industry/the big airlines/etc, recently?
"....and the gulf between the rich and the working class grows wider every year."
And whose fault is that? Is it The Rich (dramatic music plays again), who simply follow their own self-interests just like everyone else? Or could it be someone or something else?
"You see this libertarian ethos everywhere, but nowhere more clearly than in the technology sector, where the number of union jobs can be counted on one hand."
That's because (most) IT people are smart enough to not need a Defender of the Proletariat.
"Tech is the Wild West as far as the job market goes and the robber barons on top of the pile aim to keep it that way."
Oooo! I just LOVE those musty old buzz-words! Let's see if we can fit fascist and running-dog in next time; those two are my all-time favorites!
"They'll offshore your job to save a few bucks or lay you off at the first sign of a slump, but they're the first to scream, 'You're stifling innovation!' at any attempt to control the industry or provide job security for the people who do the actual work."
Who are doing the work because certain someones stuck their collective necks out to create the industry in the first place, the overwhelming majority of whom ended up in bankruptcy as reward for their efforts. Hmmm; I wonder who those people could have been?
People, Socialism doesn't work. And while I sincerely believe the original American unions saved the country from it's own October Revolution, they have since evolved into just another self-interested, bureaucratic institution that couldn't care less whether the rank and file live or die, just as long as the union bosses can continue to pull down their CEO-size paychecks.
Can anyone think of the proper term for the logical fallacy being presented here? I think it's either Straw Man or Trivial Objections. Gee; my Critical Thinking classes were a long time ago....
I worked on Big Iron back in the seventies. Even then, the reliability of those old monsters made the present-day, top-of-the-line Wintel box look utterly pathetic. (I'm still amazed at how thoroughly the PHBs were hoodwinked.)
The problem with mainframes, however, is that they're not exactly user-friendly. The AS400 class over at the local community college still deals with the hardware via the classic text interface; fast as hell, but very limited. Users (and PHBs) would scream like banshees if they had to go back to such an interface after years of Wintel's eye-candy, and that's the simple truth.
So; envision this: When the time comes that Wintel says to you 'upgrade your workstations to Vista or DIE,' strip-out the M$ on those old boxes and install just enough of Linux and X to launch a nice, solid remote X-Windows session. Next, set-up virtualized Linux partitions on a nice hunk of Big Iron and plug the thing into your IP backbone. Have the users login via their lovely new X-Terminals into a screamingly-fast Linux session on that mainframe. Cancel the Wintel upgrade budget.
Kick the idea around; come up with other stuff, like moving your DBMS to a virtual partition on that same mainframe and have it communicate to the other sessions via a private network that never leaves the machine. Stuff like that. Sound like fun? ];)
I've spent time with Dell's techs, even visited their Texas campus for a week: Dell's people are hell-on-wheels when it comes to Wintel, utterly clueless when it comes to anything else.
Against my recommendations, we installed a Dell SAN (EMC was just a wee bit more expensive). The installation engineer who showed up had our two Wintel boxen up in about two hours; a solid week later he gave up on our main fleet of Linux and Netware servers and left. I had to finish the install myself.
Support one distro (my suggestion is Debian, as you get a nice slow moving target, or Ubuntu, for predictable release cycles)....
SuSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) is, by Novell's stated policy, a slowly-moving target, in order to maintain maximum stability. It also has a very predictable release cycle.
The result? Well, in my own personal experience, if the hardware will run SLES, it will run damned-near anything else.;)
Much as I hate to, I have to agree with just-about everything the parent states, particularly regarding Novell's Marketing department. Nowhere have I seen such incompetence last so long (except perhaps in the White House).
Patching a Novell server is not trivial, topped only by GroupWise patching, which I look upon with dread. And God help you if you left out a package on install and now want to add it to a patched server.
Novell used to have an excellent administration model, where you went to a single program (NWAdmin) to do just about everything that needed to be done. Then Novell jumped onto the Java bandwagon and out stumbled ConsoleOne; the slowest, most bloated nightmare I've ever seen. Then even before all functionality could be ported to C1, here came the web interfaces; the most fragile, most confusing mess on the planet. AND THERE'S STILL STUFF STUCK ON NWADMIN!!! They've gone schizo at Novell, I swear it.
Now there's OES, a cross between NW6 and SLES9. If you've both Netware and Linux expertise in-house, it's a quite attractive server package, but if you've only Linux people, or you're pure Netware, or (most likely) neither, you're lost at sea. To top it off, I have been waiting since the release of OES to see a training package for it. I'm still waiting. I suspect I'll still be waiting for quite some time. Hey, Novell: do you really think I'm going to put a system into production that I have NO TRAINING FOR???
There are only two reasons that I haven't jumped-ship yet: the first is NDS (what those Marketing losers call 'eDirectory'), which makes AD look positively pathetic in comparison; the second is server stability. If those two points go the way of everything else, I'm outta here.
. . . . If there weren't so many creeps out there.
Fifteen years ago, the Internet was such a nice, genteel place; college students, professors, engineers, the occasional military professional. The closest anyone got to bad manners was sending an email in all-caps.
Then the General Public wanted in, and the Internet community, being such good people, decided to "share their toys with the other children."
The result: Pr0n, spam, worms, viruses, trojans, DDoS attacks (often preceded by extortion attempts), phishing . . . et-cetera.
A bit of a come-down, I'm afraid; and for some reason it all started when everyone and their dog Spot was given unlimited, effectively anonymous access to the net. Much like your proposal for open wireless. Fancy that.
There will always be jerks out there. There will always be criminals. And I am sure they will all be quite grateful for your largesse.
P.S.: Tell the RIAA and kiddie-porn cops I said "hello."
I take it you've never set foot inside a court of law.
IANAL, but I work in a courthouse, and here's what the in-house staff told me when I bounced your position off them (once they stopped laughing, that is):
If you try to trot in here with evidence which was solely under your control, which you could have altered at will at any time without impartial witnesses, the only way you'll leave that courtroom will be in little, bitty pieces.
I take it you also hold that all black people love chitlins, all hispanics snuck through a fence, and all Jews are sleazy bankers?
Really, tell me; what is the difference between your sweeping, stereotypical statement and one made by some bigot running around in the woods with a pillow case over his head?
From my own personal experiences, I think it's strictly environment.
I base this on the fact that I've met many people well-into middle-age (mostly in the US and Europe) with all the emotional maturity of the typical toddler. I've also met Third World kids, many of whom were 'older' than I ever want to be. :(
A question: If we replaced Republican with, say, Jew, and fundy with, say, kike, what exactly would be the difference between your rant and that of some bedsheet-wearing neanderthal?
You, sir, are nothing more than a bigot who has selected a Politically Correct target to focus your bigotry upon.
If you wonder why people hate us, look at the monsters with guns that wear our flag, within our country and beyond our borders. ..
....Let me guess: You've never talked to a soldier, and you're very careful not to, since the encounter just might puncture your beloved prejudices, am I correct?
. . . in the hundred or more countries we're policing against the will of those citizens. . ..
Um, name just 20% of those, please. . . . 10%, perhaps?
Slashdot Mirror
Good grief; don't any of these fifth-rate excuses for journalists know basic math? Twenty seconds with a pencil and paper would tell anyone with the brains that God gave a radish that such a short recharge cycle would require a power connection bigger around than the car itself.
:P
Go and read his work, PowerShift.
....Now, go check the copyright date.
'Nuff said.
His junk mail got so bad, he installed a small, German-made, wood/coal-burning stove. He now uses all that junk mail to help heat his house.
]XD
Microsoft could stamp their logo on a soggy bag of fermented doggy doo-doo and the lusers would still queue-up a line six blocks long to buy it.
*sigh*
The architecture you're describing is too complicated and bandwidth-intensive.
Try this instead: Have the virtual machines up and running on one or more high-performance servers. The users have thin-client terminal units (Wyse, maybe) that bootstrap from the network, then initiate a RDP-based session with one of the virtual machines. The user logs into the virtual machine, and merrily pecks away.
"When all is said and done, there will always be more said than done."
Talk. More talk. Conference rooms sloshing full with talk. Interminable oceans of talk.
Not one damned drop of do.
I've been waiting since the 60's for some do. Instead, it's all been nothing but empty, worthless talk. Talk, talk, talk, talk....
Do us all a favor: STFU and do.
"By August, almost all of HP's IT employees will have to work in one of 25 designated offices during most of the week. Those who don't wish to make this change will be out of work without severance pay."
And the beatings will continue until morale improves.
"The rich get richer,....
Yay! There's buzz-phrase #1. That's because the 'The Rich' (dramatic music plays) have this annoying habit of turning situations to their advantage, rather than sitting around whining about them.
"....the shareholder is valued more than the employee,...."
Well, then buy stock. Last I checked, it's still legal to do that.
"....jobs are eliminated in the name of bottom-line efficiency...."
Yup; and where they won't, or more commonly can't due to union rules, they eventually end up in bankruptcy, or teetering on the edge of it. Check the news on General Motors/Delphi/the steel industry/the big airlines/etc, recently?
"....and the gulf between the rich and the working class grows wider every year."
And whose fault is that? Is it The Rich (dramatic music plays again), who simply follow their own self-interests just like everyone else? Or could it be someone or something else?
"You see this libertarian ethos everywhere, but nowhere more clearly than in the technology sector, where the number of union jobs can be counted on one hand."
That's because (most) IT people are smart enough to not need a Defender of the Proletariat.
"Tech is the Wild West as far as the job market goes and the robber barons on top of the pile aim to keep it that way."
Oooo! I just LOVE those musty old buzz-words! Let's see if we can fit fascist and running-dog in next time; those two are my all-time favorites!
"They'll offshore your job to save a few bucks or lay you off at the first sign of a slump, but they're the first to scream, 'You're stifling innovation!' at any attempt to control the industry or provide job security for the people who do the actual work."
Who are doing the work because certain someones stuck their collective necks out to create the industry in the first place, the overwhelming majority of whom ended up in bankruptcy as reward for their efforts. Hmmm; I wonder who those people could have been?
People, Socialism doesn't work. And while I sincerely believe the original American unions saved the country from it's own October Revolution, they have since evolved into just another self-interested, bureaucratic institution that couldn't care less whether the rank and file live or die, just as long as the union bosses can continue to pull down their CEO-size paychecks.
Meet the new boss; same as the old boss....
'Nuff said.
Can anyone think of the proper term for the logical fallacy being presented here? I think it's either Straw Man or Trivial Objections. Gee; my Critical Thinking classes were a long time ago....
I do, however, remember what an apologist is....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apologist
BTW: Speaking of thin clients, Wyse is still around, and their pack-of-cigarettes-sized units are CHEAP.
I worked on Big Iron back in the seventies. Even then, the reliability of those old monsters made the present-day, top-of-the-line Wintel box look utterly pathetic. (I'm still amazed at how thoroughly the PHBs were hoodwinked.)
The problem with mainframes, however, is that they're not exactly user-friendly. The AS400 class over at the local community college still deals with the hardware via the classic text interface; fast as hell, but very limited. Users (and PHBs) would scream like banshees if they had to go back to such an interface after years of Wintel's eye-candy, and that's the simple truth.
So; envision this: When the time comes that Wintel says to you 'upgrade your workstations to Vista or DIE,' strip-out the M$ on those old boxes and install just enough of Linux and X to launch a nice, solid remote X-Windows session. Next, set-up virtualized Linux partitions on a nice hunk of Big Iron and plug the thing into your IP backbone. Have the users login via their lovely new X-Terminals into a screamingly-fast Linux session on that mainframe. Cancel the Wintel upgrade budget.
Kick the idea around; come up with other stuff, like moving your DBMS to a virtual partition on that same mainframe and have it communicate to the other sessions via a private network that never leaves the machine. Stuff like that. Sound like fun?
];)
Let me get this straight; this community connectivity will cost about $15 million?
How much is that in Iraq War minutes???
I've spent time with Dell's techs, even visited their Texas campus for a week: Dell's people are hell-on-wheels when it comes to Wintel, utterly clueless when it comes to anything else.
Against my recommendations, we installed a Dell SAN (EMC was just a wee bit more expensive). The installation engineer who showed up had our two Wintel boxen up in about two hours; a solid week later he gave up on our main fleet of Linux and Netware servers and left. I had to finish the install myself.
Never again.
And thus cometh a memo from the domain from the fearless & clueless Ultimate Leader:
"After a six-martini lunch and eighteen holes of golf, I have seen the Light: Thou shalt install Microsoft."
And so it was in the small- and medium-businesses, and so it shall come to pass elsewhere.
Support one distro (my suggestion is Debian, as you get a nice slow moving target, or Ubuntu, for predictable release cycles)....
;)
SuSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) is, by Novell's stated policy, a slowly-moving target, in order to maintain maximum stability. It also has a very predictable release cycle.
The result? Well, in my own personal experience, if the hardware will run SLES, it will run damned-near anything else.
Much as I hate to, I have to agree with just-about everything the parent states, particularly regarding Novell's Marketing department. Nowhere have I seen such incompetence last so long (except perhaps in the White House).
Patching a Novell server is not trivial, topped only by GroupWise patching, which I look upon with dread. And God help you if you left out a package on install and now want to add it to a patched server.
Novell used to have an excellent administration model, where you went to a single program (NWAdmin) to do just about everything that needed to be done. Then Novell jumped onto the Java bandwagon and out stumbled ConsoleOne; the slowest, most bloated nightmare I've ever seen. Then even before all functionality could be ported to C1, here came the web interfaces; the most fragile, most confusing mess on the planet. AND THERE'S STILL STUFF STUCK ON NWADMIN!!! They've gone schizo at Novell, I swear it.
Now there's OES, a cross between NW6 and SLES9. If you've both Netware and Linux expertise in-house, it's a quite attractive server package, but if you've only Linux people, or you're pure Netware, or (most likely) neither, you're lost at sea. To top it off, I have been waiting since the release of OES to see a training package for it. I'm still waiting. I suspect I'll still be waiting for quite some time. Hey, Novell: do you really think I'm going to put a system into production that I have NO TRAINING FOR???
There are only two reasons that I haven't jumped-ship yet: the first is NDS (what those Marketing losers call 'eDirectory'), which makes AD look positively pathetic in comparison; the second is server stability. If those two points go the way of everything else, I'm outta here.
'Nuff said.
I agree. One lousy little wizard, and they were too cheap to do even that.
I've found LINKSYS SSIDs in government offices, for God's sake. Hanging wide open.
8P
. . . . If there weren't so many creeps out there.
Fifteen years ago, the Internet was such a nice, genteel place; college students, professors, engineers, the occasional military professional. The closest anyone got to bad manners was sending an email in all-caps.
Then the General Public wanted in, and the Internet community, being such good people, decided to "share their toys with the other children."
The result: Pr0n, spam, worms, viruses, trojans, DDoS attacks (often preceded by extortion attempts), phishing . . . et-cetera.
A bit of a come-down, I'm afraid; and for some reason it all started when everyone and their dog Spot was given unlimited, effectively anonymous access to the net. Much like your proposal for open wireless. Fancy that.
There will always be jerks out there. There will always be criminals. And I am sure they will all be quite grateful for your largesse.
P.S.: Tell the RIAA and kiddie-porn cops I said "hello."
I take it you've never set foot inside a court of law.
IANAL, but I work in a courthouse, and here's what the in-house staff told me when I bounced your position off them (once they stopped laughing, that is):
If you try to trot in here with evidence which was solely under your control, which you could have altered at will at any time without impartial witnesses, the only way you'll leave that courtroom will be in little, bitty pieces.
'Nuff said.
The result was tanks in the square.
I take it you also hold that all black people love chitlins, all hispanics snuck through a fence, and all Jews are sleazy bankers?
Really, tell me; what is the difference between your sweeping, stereotypical statement and one made by some bigot running around in the woods with a pillow case over his head?
From my own personal experiences, I think it's strictly environment.
:(
I base this on the fact that I've met many people well-into middle-age (mostly in the US and Europe) with all the emotional maturity of the typical toddler. I've also met Third World kids, many of whom were 'older' than I ever want to be.
A question: If we replaced Republican with, say, Jew, and fundy with, say, kike, what exactly would be the difference between your rant and that of some bedsheet-wearing neanderthal?
You, sir, are nothing more than a bigot who has selected a Politically Correct target to focus your bigotry upon.
If you wonder why people hate us, look at the monsters with guns that wear our flag, within our country and beyond our borders. . .
.
....Let me guess: You've never talked to a soldier, and you're very careful not to, since the encounter just might puncture your beloved prejudices, am I correct?
. . . in the hundred or more countries we're policing against the will of those citizens. . .
Um, name just 20% of those, please. . . . 10%, perhaps?