If companies start sharing code, there will be less code that needs to be written in-house, which means some people are going to be losing their jobs.
That is "fixed pie" thinking. Underneath your statement is an assumption: that there's only a fixed amount of work to be done, that the amount of work "pie" available is fixed and unchanging. That simply isn't true.
The real purpose of a job is to generate wealth. Janitors create the wealth of a cleaner environment. CEOs create the wealth of a smoothly running organization. Factory works create the wealth of manufactured goods. And so on...
If wealth gets generated more efficiently, everybody benefits, because there's more total wealth to be distributed. An organization that "eliminates" a few positions is then wealthier, which then makes it more likely to increase its product base, thereby creating more positions. While there are cyclical deviations and occasional abuses, (generally covered by existing laws) it's largely a self-regulating system.
Don't be afraid of change. Be afraid of stagnance.
When I was a kid, just 25 years ago, the idea of a "personal communicator" a la Star Trek was fantastic. 10 years later it was an expensive reality, called the "Cell Phone". Now, it's so common that the poor use them preferentially. The cell phone is now a commodity.
You can believe what you want about Scientology, but this represents seminal social change. The rules have changed forever. The pace of progress is definitely accelerating in almost every aspect except maybe total KWH of energy consumed by each person, which has more or less held flat (or dropped!) since the mid-1970's.
As the CTO of a rapidly growing, million-dollar company that provides ASP-model information management software, I can attest that PostgreSQL is just... awesome.
It quickly and easily scales into the hundreds of millions of records with good support on commodity hardware and incredible reliability. It provides excellent data-integrity checks - it's like programming with a safety net built in! Its license is open to commercial development, the support is great, and rarely needed. We rely HEAVILY on foreign keys, constraints, and the like to ensure clean data, with a schema now at almost 200 tables, fully normalized. PostgreSQL handles 12-table joins with flair. Bonus - its syntax is highly compatible with ANSI SQL, meaning that porting a project developed on PG will easily port to Oracle or DB2, even when you use a rich database schema!
Could it be better? Yeah - replication options are weak, especially in our environment, where we have a database schema that changes daily. But even in this case, this is mitigated by hourly database snapshots created a la cron - the performance hit is minor, and the recovery time in the (very rare) event of a failure is quick. And as a former sysad, I can attest to the number of times MySQL replication got it all wrong and had to be rebuilt from scratch.
Really, I just don't understand why MySQL still gets all the press - in nearly every metric that matters, PostgreSQL wins hands-down.
Although I completely disagree with sony's actions here, it makes sense that a computer without all the crap would cost more. A crap filled PC is subsidized by revenue from the crap vendors, a clean PC is not.
How much do you want to bet that Sony didn't drop the amount of subsidies they've charged the software company?
It's the same reason hackers devote so much time exploiting Windows - more bang for your buck. phpBB is everywhere.
Except that popularity != exploitability. Many people think that software is like a safe - if you grind at it long enough, eventually it'll open. Software isn't like that. You can grind at software forever and it won't change anything unless you actually find a vulnerability - a case not handled by the software.
For example, MySQL is much more popular online than Microsoft SQL. Yet MS-SQL gave rise to the slammer worm while the vastly-more-commonly-installed MySQL has not ever been infected by anything anywhere near the same magnitude. (Yes, there have been a few. They didn't get very far)
The formula is NOT: Popularity = Exploited.
It's more like Popularity * Bad Design = Exploited.
And even bad software can eventually be cleaned up. Sendmail used to be a security nightmare. But despite its position as the #1 mail server software on the Internet, it's been quite a few years since any serious vulns were exploited.
The problem of distributing large amounts of content *efficiently8 was solved in 1985. No, I'm not kidding.
Newsgroup servers routinely distribute and cache content locally to minimize overall network traffic. They can distribute only the headers of the news feed, and then cache the content after it's been requested and downloaded.
This is a *very* efficient content distribution system, and ironically, it's a system more resistant to takedown notices and the like than BT. (It's virtually impossible to entirely remove content from NNTP once it's been posted there)
Brings to mind the saying:
Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it. --George Santayana
How do you possibly get an average of LESS than one hop, unless you're getting the file from yourself?
Easy! They ran it in simulation, using VMware. Have you ever used VMware? It's an amazing tool that makes an excellent platform for simulations and prototypes, especially when you need to know exactly how applications will perform in the real world.
Game developers, for example, routinely use VMware sessions. Especially the hard-core, 3D FPS developers.
To be underwhelmed is not merely to fail to be impressed, but to becognizant of the fact that you have failed to have been impressed. If you ate a bagel and it made no impression on you, if someone asked you about your breakfast, you'd absently say 'it was fine' without 2nd thought; you haven't been underwhelmed. But if you'd sat there eating your bagel and came to the realization that it really wasn't particularly good, that its taste and texture really did nothing for you, then you might come to say that you found it underwhelming.
To your definition, I would refine the definition of underwhel to be "fail to impress while expecting otherwise". I wouldn't say that your example bagel is underwhelming, merely mediocre. But if I was expecting that the bagel was going to be fabulous, but it wasn't, it would THEN be underwhelming. If it was a fancy, imported Italian bagel that I paid extra for, and it wasn't much different that the local grocery bagel, it would be underwhelming.
It could also have the (ahem) ironic definition of specifically characterizing the non-impressiveness of something as a back-handled insult. EG: "Well, his technical skills are, eh, underwhelming." In this case, the unimpressiveness of the result is carried to its extreme. Like saying that it's impressively unimpressive.
Without any kind of supporting reason, all the above statements are about as reasonable as yours.
That's all I have to say about that.
This is where the logic bomb kinda goes off. Because you said more about it, you said that you'd posted it before, and further, that it's all that you have to say about it. So you don't have any more to say about it, other than the fact that you do, but you don't have supporting arguments...
There lies madness....
In any event, come back when you DO have something more to say.
if you were aiming for a flight that departed the runway at 12 noon, what time would you leave your house.. 11am?
FYI: If I left any time after 9:30 AM, I would be stressing being "late". 10:00 AM and I'd be rather unsure of catching the plane. 10:30 AM and I'm canceling the trip.
When mobile broadband is $40/mo all over the country, get back to me. I expect that'll be in about 20 years.
I get broadband (~ 1 Mb) wireless service in most cities (over ~ 30,000 population) with my laptop in the car on the freeway using my Verizon data card. I get speeds comparable to a 128 Kbps modem most other places, and when I'm really out in the sticks, it's more like 50Kbps. I think my company is paying $59/month for this. (might be $69/month) It has no bandwidth limit that I know of.
Oh, and it works fine with Linux, though you have to activate the card on a Windows system. (I'm using Fedora Core 8, no problems, running a pppd script in a terminal window) I guess $60/month isn't $40, but it's not that far off. And the utility of a hotspot only comes into play in areas where I can't get the broadband access, which is, increasingly, rare.
Kind of makes the cost and time to get a pilots license that much more attractive.
I will SECOND that motion! It's a rare month that I don't fly, I often fly 3-4 times per month. I recently got my private pilot's license. (yay!)
Flying to Oakland, CA? Go on a commercial jet, and you experience:
1) 1.5 hour trip to the nearest "major" airport. 2) 1-2 hour long wait at the security line. 3) Rude staff. 4) Lousy amenities. 5) Destination airport virtually guaranteed to be 1-2 hours drive away from the actual destination. 6) Cramped seat.
Now, I'm flying more and more privately, I'm in negotiations to buy into a partnership. Here's what I see so far:
1) Local airport, 5 minute drive. 2) 10 minute wait checking the plane out before flight. Effectively no security check. 3) Friendly staff that make it a point to remember your name. 4) Gorgeous bathrooms, with plants, tile, and free hygiene kits. (shave, toothbrush, etc) Free coffee, dough nuts, etc. Often catered luncheons for free as well. Leather seats, free waiting rooms with DVD collection, free conference room! 5) Destination virtually guaranteed to be anywhere from 10 minutes drive to ACROSS THE STREET from a small, local airport. 6) Cramped seat. (Hey, some things never change!)
Seriously, the difference is NIGHT AND DAY. Commercial = cattle. Private = red carpet. And, for shorter flights, the price difference is less than you might think.
Compare 15% against Moore's law, and you find that it equates to a few weeks delay in the price-performance curve.
If it takes more than a few weeks to make the switch, you've already lost your benefit, as well as the potential of destabilizing your administration of those systems. Backups have be revisited, since the file tree will have changed. Network monitors will have to be updated, and tested for compatibility changes. Little one-off scripts to solve problem X or Y in a hurry will break. Admins will have to be trained, and will make more mistakes for a while until they find out what not to do. Unforeseen wrinkles will inevitably appear, Etc... Etc... Etc...
100 years from now. Do you thing proprietary software has a chance in hell?
Sure. Why would you think proprietary software would "go away"?
It just is not sustainable to have every business, school, and government paying 1 provider of software for an operating system.
Agreed. But these two points within your paragraph are non-sequitur. ("Proprietary Sotware" != "Operating System)
What's happening in software is the same thing that happens to any marketplace that gets commoditized... the base price of the commodity (EG: Operating System) drops to a very low level based on the cost of production and distribution. But value added can increase that price sharply.
A tomato is quite cheap. Tomatoes made into salads and served on attractive plates by sexy waitresses in fancy restaurants are not cheap. The value added is in the air of the restaurant, the clean plate, the sexy waitress, and the tasty salad.
Grocery store tomato is analogous to OSS software.
Restaurant is analogous to proprietary software.
It's been happening in marketplaces for a long, long, LONG time.
Nobody living outside their parents' basement is going switch from Linux to BSD for a 15% performance increase. Somebody already using BSD might upgrade if the latest BSD kernels and environment are significantly better than past environments, but 15% is so slight as to be basically undetectable in a real-world environment!
My rule of thumb for upgrading equipment has been to not bother until we hit a full order of magnitude improvement. In other words, if 1) we can 10X the performance of a system AND 2) there have been complaints about performance, then the upgrade is probably worth it. Even then, the value is dubious. For example, in Postgres, (or any other database application) it's very typical to see 100x improvement simply by creating an index!
Maybe this is good for frail BSD egos, who have been long bruised by the mindshare success of Linux over the more historic and "more free" BSD. So be it. But it's not performance that's kept me from using BSD, it's familiarity and the pain of switching. And that's also what kept me running it yesterday, will today, and tomorrow too.
Don't get me wrong - I would hate to see BSD "die" in any meaningful way. The different cultures between Linux and BSD create a very rich, diverse environment where ideas can be tested, and the cross-feed of proven concepts and technologies (EG: Open SSH) benefits all involved!
But the benefit of a 15% performance increase is almost never going to be sufficient reason to pick one computing technology over another!
Unless you plan to either have enough money to not use either of those programs or have your own kids (whom you'd have to have first) pay enough in taxes to support you in your old age, be glad others are having kids...
I HAVE SIX KIDS.
Yes, I've wondered at times if I'm farking nuts. But my 6, intelligent, hard-working kids will be paying for your future. So you really should be paying me a stipend. Nothing major, maybe $100/month for each person that reads this? Just think of all the money you'll get on SSI from my childrens' hard labor!?!?
To make it easier to pay me, my bank account information: Routing 232233535 Account 124533358446
You can use this just like the Military General's wife from Nigeria...
This is now the way Southwest boards, and it's quick and rational (as is their "no assigned seating" plan, especially for their typical short flights).
No it isn't. All SouthWest has is a way to keep the lines shorter. Once you get on the plane, you can sit wherever you like. Of course, if you don't get an "A" ticket, you can kiss your chance for a window seat goodbye. But you still end up with the dork who holds up the entire line of people boarding so that he can get a seat near the front while he takes off his jacket and digs in his carry-on bag for his MP3 player before putting it above.
Me? I'm more of a "Coach-jerk". I check in everything I can. I board quickly, usually with an "A" ticket. I go for the window seat, my laptop goes on the floor in front of me, my jacket goes into the seat next to me. I pull my hat down, lean back, and start reading.
Usually, I get the seat next to me empty, though if anybody asks, I'm nice about moving my jacket. Coach is so much nicer when you have a nice, empty seat next to you to park your crap!
But when we get off, that's where everybody does the stupid - they all rush off the plane so that they can stand for 20 minutes at the baggage claim. Me? I wait until EVERYBODY is off the plane, reading my book or whatever. When *everybody* is OFF the plane and the stewardess is wondering what to say to me, that's when I get off. A nice, easy walk to the baggage claim, and I get there right as the bags first start popping out every time.
It's a very difficult problem to manage unless you have trusted people overseeing the entire manufacturing operation. The amount of gross margin in Cisco gear makes this activity extremely profitable.
And this is where outsourcing becomes so viciously dangerous. When considering outsourcing, it's important to limit it to only those areas that are not "core competencies". If your core business is to manufacture hardware, it's just stupid to outsource manufacturing hardware. If you're in the business of hosting, don't outsource your hosting.
Sure, when you do, there may be short term cost reductions. But in the process, you lose something very basic and fundamental. When you outsource your core competency, you are sort of living a professional lie, and that lie will catch up to you!
Maybe. One of the things that I've noticed is that as the bandwidth increases it becomes harder and harder to fill it up.
Really? I notice a very, very clear trend in the *other* direction.
Web pages used to be 5k simple text, maybe a pic or two. Now they're routinely a 300k flash animation doohickey - for the HOME PAGE. Once upon a time, I didn't use my computer as a replacement for television. Today, it's normal to have 2 or 3 computers in my house watching different shows (a la Youtube, etc) concurrently.
Used to be that my 1.5 Mb DSL line was just unbelievably fast. Now, 7 years later, it's routinely maxed out. I've upgraded my home network from 10 Mb to 100 Mb to 1 Gb. Part of my home network is still 100 Mb, and IT'S SLOW when I copy over an ISO image or do network backups...
The only way to fix it is for name-based SSL lookups, so the initial part of the connection is unencrypted as it detects the individual website you're surfing to. The initial part could not be encrypted unless yu had a certificate for your server and referenced it in the subsequent SSL website name lookup. Mind you, unencrypted handshaking wouldn't be much of a security risk, I think.
Which sounds fine, but that ain't going to happen. Also, the value of this is greatly mitigated when root domains (eg:.com) cease all restrictions. At which point, there is no "wildcard DNS that is a gaping security hole" problem.
I mean, why the.com? Why not just bill@ibm or me@mycompany?
The real problem is https not http - you don't get the host header until well after you had to present a certificate to the browser.
Except that isn't exactly 100% true, either. This flies in the face of years and years of conventional wisdom, but I'm already doing it! You can host any number of SSL sites at *different* domains using the same certificate, with certain limitations, if it's set up correctly. I host nearly a hundred websites at the same IP address with different domains, without errors in common browsers. (Firefox, IE, Safari, Opera)
This trick is accomplished with wildcard SSL certificates! As you can see, Prices aren't even all that unreasonable. All it is is a certificate that wildcards subdomains. EG: *.mydomain.com instead of "secure.mydomain.com".
So technically, if you could get one of the "approved" certificate providers to make a wildcard DNS for *.com, SSL could be applied to any number of SSL websites on the same server, and you could host every single.com website with SSL support on a single IP address. (if you could come up with a server or cluster that could handle the load, that is)
This fact might be viewed by some as a *MASSIVE* security hole. Imagine being unable to trust *any* SSL website certificates!?!?
The problem is the limit of root domains:.com,.org,.net,.gov,.biz, the 2-letter countries, and a few others. This creates an artificial chokepoint with limited numbers of root domains.
But we may soon see an end to this, since ICANN has been making noises about unlimited TLDs. Really, there's no reason to have limited TLDs, when you think about it - even technically. This doesn't completely answer the question/issue of SSL certificates and domain names, but it sure does reduce the problem, and in fact, would improve security!
The US has no censorship laws Just try to say something against the brain fuckery known as The Church Of Scientology - see how long before their lawyers bend you over a couch... Brain fuckery may be an excellent term for it - but in this case, although the Co$ may harass you for being truthful if it's inconvenient, it's not illegal to say that, in your opinion, they are all a bunch of rodent wankers.
Just because the police don't come and get you for calling your daddy a loser, doesn't mean that your momma won't.
Oh, and the Co$ is one SCARY bunch. Anonymous marches on March 15...
Slashdot Mirror
I mean seriously.... Bret Arsenault?
Did he legally change his name after he got hired? Other cool pseudo-names: Ima Baadash, Tod Newclierre, or John Wepunce.
If companies start sharing code, there will be less code that needs to be written in-house, which means some people are going to be losing their jobs.
That is "fixed pie" thinking. Underneath your statement is an assumption: that there's only a fixed amount of work to be done, that the amount of work "pie" available is fixed and unchanging. That simply isn't true.
The real purpose of a job is to generate wealth. Janitors create the wealth of a cleaner environment. CEOs create the wealth of a smoothly running organization. Factory works create the wealth of manufactured goods. And so on...
If wealth gets generated more efficiently, everybody benefits, because there's more total wealth to be distributed. An organization that "eliminates" a few positions is then wealthier, which then makes it more likely to increase its product base, thereby creating more positions. While there are cyclical deviations and occasional abuses, (generally covered by existing laws) it's largely a self-regulating system.
Don't be afraid of change. Be afraid of stagnance.
Progress is flatlining.
Funny. I see the opposite trend...
When I was a kid, just 25 years ago, the idea of a "personal communicator" a la Star Trek was fantastic. 10 years later it was an expensive reality, called the "Cell Phone". Now, it's so common that the poor use them preferentially. The cell phone is now a commodity.
But it took far more than 15 years for cars to become commodities. And the trend is accelerating - Anonymous coordinated a global march of almost 10,000 people worldwide against Scientology in less than a month. Try THAT in 1975. In just two months, the term "RickRolled' has become almost commonplace.
You can believe what you want about Scientology, but this represents seminal social change. The rules have changed forever. The pace of progress is definitely accelerating in almost every aspect except maybe total KWH of energy consumed by each person, which has more or less held flat (or dropped!) since the mid-1970's.
As the CTO of a rapidly growing, million-dollar company that provides ASP-model information management software, I can attest that PostgreSQL is just... awesome.
It quickly and easily scales into the hundreds of millions of records with good support on commodity hardware and incredible reliability. It provides excellent data-integrity checks - it's like programming with a safety net built in! Its license is open to commercial development, the support is great, and rarely needed. We rely HEAVILY on foreign keys, constraints, and the like to ensure clean data, with a schema now at almost 200 tables, fully normalized. PostgreSQL handles 12-table joins with flair. Bonus - its syntax is highly compatible with ANSI SQL, meaning that porting a project developed on PG will easily port to Oracle or DB2, even when you use a rich database schema!
Could it be better? Yeah - replication options are weak, especially in our environment, where we have a database schema that changes daily. But even in this case, this is mitigated by hourly database snapshots created a la cron - the performance hit is minor, and the recovery time in the (very rare) event of a failure is quick. And as a former sysad, I can attest to the number of times MySQL replication got it all wrong and had to be rebuilt from scratch.
Really, I just don't understand why MySQL still gets all the press - in nearly every metric that matters, PostgreSQL wins hands-down.
Although I completely disagree with sony's actions here, it makes sense that a computer without all the crap would cost more. A crap filled PC is subsidized by revenue from the crap vendors, a clean PC is not.
How much do you want to bet that Sony didn't drop the amount of subsidies they've charged the software company?
It's the same reason hackers devote so much time exploiting Windows - more bang for your buck. phpBB is everywhere.
Except that popularity != exploitability. Many people think that software is like a safe - if you grind at it long enough, eventually it'll open. Software isn't like that. You can grind at software forever and it won't change anything unless you actually find a vulnerability - a case not handled by the software.
For example, MySQL is much more popular online than Microsoft SQL. Yet MS-SQL gave rise to the slammer worm while the vastly-more-commonly-installed MySQL has not ever been infected by anything anywhere near the same magnitude. (Yes, there have been a few. They didn't get very far)
The formula is NOT:
Popularity = Exploited.
It's more like
Popularity * Bad Design = Exploited.
And even bad software can eventually be cleaned up. Sendmail used to be a security nightmare. But despite its position as the #1 mail server software on the Internet, it's been quite a few years since any serious vulns were exploited.
Newsgroup servers routinely distribute and cache content locally to minimize overall network traffic. They can distribute only the headers of the news feed, and then cache the content after it's been requested and downloaded.
This is a *very* efficient content distribution system, and ironically, it's a system more resistant to takedown notices and the like than BT. (It's virtually impossible to entirely remove content from NNTP once it's been posted there)
Brings to mind the saying: Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
--George Santayana
How do you possibly get an average of LESS than one hop, unless you're getting the file from yourself?
Easy! They ran it in simulation, using VMware. Have you ever used VMware? It's an amazing tool that makes an excellent platform for simulations and prototypes, especially when you need to know exactly how applications will perform in the real world.
Game developers, for example, routinely use VMware sessions. Especially the hard-core, 3D FPS developers.
No, really!
To be underwhelmed is not merely to fail to be impressed, but to becognizant of the fact that you have failed to have been impressed. If you ate a bagel and it made no impression on you, if someone asked you about your breakfast, you'd absently say 'it was fine' without 2nd thought; you haven't been underwhelmed. But if you'd sat there eating your bagel and came to the realization that it really wasn't particularly good, that its taste and texture really did nothing for you, then you might come to say that you found it underwhelming.
To your definition, I would refine the definition of underwhel to be "fail to impress while expecting otherwise". I wouldn't say that your example bagel is underwhelming, merely mediocre. But if I was expecting that the bagel was going to be fabulous, but it wasn't, it would THEN be underwhelming. If it was a fancy, imported Italian bagel that I paid extra for, and it wasn't much different that the local grocery bagel, it would be underwhelming.
It could also have the (ahem) ironic definition of specifically characterizing the non-impressiveness of something as a back-handled insult. EG: "Well, his technical skills are, eh, underwhelming." In this case, the unimpressiveness of the result is carried to its extreme. Like saying that it's impressively unimpressive.
Waiting for Android. Fuck the iPhone.
Without reason? Why not go with:
"Waiting for Intelligent Design. Fuck evolution".
or "Waiting for Windows Server 2009. Fuck Linux".
or "Waiting for SCO. Fuck the GPL!"
Without any kind of supporting reason, all the above statements are about as reasonable as yours.
That's all I have to say about that.
This is where the logic bomb kinda goes off. Because you said more about it, you said that you'd posted it before, and further, that it's all that you have to say about it. So you don't have any more to say about it, other than the fact that you do, but you don't have supporting arguments...
There lies madness....
In any event, come back when you DO have something more to say.
Ok, so they're submitting Windows 7? Knowing that we start with Windows 3.x, we should probably assume:
Windows 3.x = the first windows that didn't completely AND utterly suck. Windows 3.11 only completely sucked.
Windows 4.x = Windows NT/2000/XP.
Windows 5.x = Windows 95/98/ME
Windows 6.x = Windows Vista
My guess, anybody care to confirm?
if you were aiming for a flight that departed the runway at 12 noon, what time would you leave your house.. 11am?
FYI: If I left any time after 9:30 AM, I would be stressing being "late". 10:00 AM and I'd be rather unsure of catching the plane. 10:30 AM and I'm canceling the trip.
When mobile broadband is $40/mo all over the country, get back to me. I expect that'll be in about 20 years.
I get broadband (~ 1 Mb) wireless service in most cities (over ~ 30,000 population) with my laptop in the car on the freeway using my Verizon data card. I get speeds comparable to a 128 Kbps modem most other places, and when I'm really out in the sticks, it's more like 50Kbps. I think my company is paying $59/month for this. (might be $69/month) It has no bandwidth limit that I know of.
Oh, and it works fine with Linux, though you have to activate the card on a Windows system. (I'm using Fedora Core 8, no problems, running a pppd script in a terminal window) I guess $60/month isn't $40, but it's not that far off.
And the utility of a hotspot only comes into play in areas where I can't get the broadband access, which is, increasingly, rare.
Kind of makes the cost and time to get a pilots license that much more attractive.
I will SECOND that motion! It's a rare month that I don't fly, I often fly 3-4 times per month. I recently got my private pilot's license. (yay!)
Flying to Oakland, CA? Go on a commercial jet, and you experience:
1) 1.5 hour trip to the nearest "major" airport.
2) 1-2 hour long wait at the security line.
3) Rude staff.
4) Lousy amenities.
5) Destination airport virtually guaranteed to be 1-2 hours drive away from the actual destination.
6) Cramped seat.
Now, I'm flying more and more privately, I'm in negotiations to buy into a partnership. Here's what I see so far:
1) Local airport, 5 minute drive.
2) 10 minute wait checking the plane out before flight. Effectively no security check.
3) Friendly staff that make it a point to remember your name.
4) Gorgeous bathrooms, with plants, tile, and free hygiene kits. (shave, toothbrush, etc) Free coffee, dough nuts, etc. Often catered luncheons for free as well. Leather seats, free waiting rooms with DVD collection, free conference room!
5) Destination virtually guaranteed to be anywhere from 10 minutes drive to ACROSS THE STREET from a small, local airport.
6) Cramped seat. (Hey, some things never change!)
Seriously, the difference is NIGHT AND DAY. Commercial = cattle. Private = red carpet. And, for shorter flights, the price difference is less than you might think.
Compare 15% against Moore's law, and you find that it equates to a few weeks delay in the price-performance curve.
If it takes more than a few weeks to make the switch, you've already lost your benefit, as well as the potential of destabilizing your administration of those systems. Backups have be revisited, since the file tree will have changed. Network monitors will have to be updated, and tested for compatibility changes. Little one-off scripts to solve problem X or Y in a hurry will break. Admins will have to be trained, and will make more mistakes for a while until they find out what not to do. Unforeseen wrinkles will inevitably appear, Etc... Etc... Etc...
Worth it for Google? Not a chance!
100 years from now. Do you thing proprietary software has a chance in hell?
Sure. Why would you think proprietary software would "go away"?
It just is not sustainable to have every business, school, and government paying 1 provider of software for an operating system.
Agreed. But these two points within your paragraph are non-sequitur. ("Proprietary Sotware" != "Operating System)
What's happening in software is the same thing that happens to any marketplace that gets commoditized... the base price of the commodity (EG: Operating System) drops to a very low level based on the cost of production and distribution. But value added can increase that price sharply.
A tomato is quite cheap. Tomatoes made into salads and served on attractive plates by sexy waitresses in fancy restaurants are not cheap. The value added is in the air of the restaurant, the clean plate, the sexy waitress, and the tasty salad.
Grocery store tomato is analogous to OSS software.
Restaurant is analogous to proprietary software.
It's been happening in marketplaces for a long, long, LONG time.
Yes, I meant that: who cares?
Nobody living outside their parents' basement is going switch from Linux to BSD for a 15% performance increase. Somebody already using BSD might upgrade if the latest BSD kernels and environment are significantly better than past environments, but 15% is so slight as to be basically undetectable in a real-world environment!
My rule of thumb for upgrading equipment has been to not bother until we hit a full order of magnitude improvement. In other words, if 1) we can 10X the performance of a system AND 2) there have been complaints about performance, then the upgrade is probably worth it. Even then, the value is dubious. For example, in Postgres, (or any other database application) it's very typical to see 100x improvement simply by creating an index!
Maybe this is good for frail BSD egos, who have been long bruised by the mindshare success of Linux over the more historic and "more free" BSD. So be it. But it's not performance that's kept me from using BSD, it's familiarity and the pain of switching. And that's also what kept me running it yesterday, will today, and tomorrow too.
Don't get me wrong - I would hate to see BSD "die" in any meaningful way. The different cultures between Linux and BSD create a very rich, diverse environment where ideas can be tested, and the cross-feed of proven concepts and technologies (EG: Open SSH) benefits all involved!
But the benefit of a 15% performance increase is almost never going to be sufficient reason to pick one computing technology over another!
Unless you plan to either have enough money to not use either of those programs or have your own kids (whom you'd have to have first) pay enough in taxes to support you in your old age, be glad others are having kids...
I HAVE SIX KIDS.
Yes, I've wondered at times if I'm farking nuts. But my 6, intelligent, hard-working kids will be paying for your future. So you really should be paying me a stipend. Nothing major, maybe $100/month for each person that reads this? Just think of all the money you'll get on SSI from my childrens' hard labor!?!?
To make it easier to pay me, my bank account information:
Routing 232233535
Account 124533358446
You can use this just like the Military General's wife from Nigeria...
This is now the way Southwest boards, and it's quick and rational (as is their "no assigned seating" plan, especially for their typical short flights).
No it isn't. All SouthWest has is a way to keep the lines shorter. Once you get on the plane, you can sit wherever you like. Of course, if you don't get an "A" ticket, you can kiss your chance for a window seat goodbye. But you still end up with the dork who holds up the entire line of people boarding so that he can get a seat near the front while he takes off his jacket and digs in his carry-on bag for his MP3 player before putting it above.
Me? I'm more of a "Coach-jerk". I check in everything I can. I board quickly, usually with an "A" ticket. I go for the window seat, my laptop goes on the floor in front of me, my jacket goes into the seat next to me. I pull my hat down, lean back, and start reading.
Usually, I get the seat next to me empty, though if anybody asks, I'm nice about moving my jacket. Coach is so much nicer when you have a nice, empty seat next to you to park your crap!
But when we get off, that's where everybody does the stupid - they all rush off the plane so that they can stand for 20 minutes at the baggage claim. Me? I wait until EVERYBODY is off the plane, reading my book or whatever. When *everybody* is OFF the plane and the stewardess is wondering what to say to me, that's when I get off. A nice, easy walk to the baggage claim, and I get there right as the bags first start popping out every time.
It's a very difficult problem to manage unless you have trusted people overseeing the entire manufacturing operation. The amount of gross margin in Cisco gear makes this activity extremely profitable.
And this is where outsourcing becomes so viciously dangerous. When considering outsourcing, it's important to limit it to only those areas that are not "core competencies". If your core business is to manufacture hardware, it's just stupid to outsource manufacturing hardware. If you're in the business of hosting, don't outsource your hosting.
Sure, when you do, there may be short term cost reductions. But in the process, you lose something very basic and fundamental. When you outsource your core competency, you are sort of living a professional lie, and that lie will catch up to you!
Maybe. One of the things that I've noticed is that as the bandwidth increases it becomes harder and harder to fill it up.
Really? I notice a very, very clear trend in the *other* direction.
Web pages used to be 5k simple text, maybe a pic or two. Now they're routinely a 300k flash animation doohickey - for the HOME PAGE. Once upon a time, I didn't use my computer as a replacement for television. Today, it's normal to have 2 or 3 computers in my house watching different shows (a la Youtube, etc) concurrently.
Used to be that my 1.5 Mb DSL line was just unbelievably fast. Now, 7 years later, it's routinely maxed out. I've upgraded my home network from 10 Mb to 100 Mb to 1 Gb. Part of my home network is still 100 Mb, and IT'S SLOW when I copy over an ISO image or do network backups...
What do you actually DO with your networks?
What's that in LOCs?
Uh, wait...
The only way to fix it is for name-based SSL lookups, so the initial part of the connection is unencrypted as it detects the individual website you're surfing to. The initial part could not be encrypted unless yu had a certificate for your server and referenced it in the subsequent SSL website name lookup. Mind you, unencrypted handshaking wouldn't be much of a security risk, I think.
.com) cease all restrictions. At which point, there is no "wildcard DNS that is a gaping security hole" problem.
.com? Why not just bill@ibm or me@mycompany?
Which sounds fine, but that ain't going to happen. Also, the value of this is greatly mitigated when root domains (eg:
I mean, why the
The real problem is https not http - you don't get the host header until well after you had to present a certificate to the browser.
.com website with SSL support on a single IP address. (if you could come up with a server or cluster that could handle the load, that is)
.com, .org, .net, .gov, .biz, the 2-letter countries, and a few others. This creates an artificial chokepoint with limited numbers of root domains.
Except that isn't exactly 100% true, either. This flies in the face of years and years of conventional wisdom, but I'm already doing it! You can host any number of SSL sites at *different* domains using the same certificate, with certain limitations, if it's set up correctly. I host nearly a hundred websites at the same IP address with different domains, without errors in common browsers. (Firefox, IE, Safari, Opera)
This trick is accomplished with wildcard SSL certificates! As you can see, Prices aren't even all that unreasonable. All it is is a certificate that wildcards subdomains. EG: *.mydomain.com instead of "secure.mydomain.com".
So technically, if you could get one of the "approved" certificate providers to make a wildcard DNS for *.com, SSL could be applied to any number of SSL websites on the same server, and you could host every single
This fact might be viewed by some as a *MASSIVE* security hole. Imagine being unable to trust *any* SSL website certificates!?!?
The problem is the limit of root domains:
But we may soon see an end to this, since ICANN has been making noises about unlimited TLDs. Really, there's no reason to have limited TLDs, when you think about it - even technically. This doesn't completely answer the question/issue of SSL certificates and domain names, but it sure does reduce the problem, and in fact, would improve security!
Just because the police don't come and get you for calling your daddy a loser, doesn't mean that your momma won't.
Oh, and the Co$ is one SCARY bunch. Anonymous marches on March 15...