They're betting on the MTTF of the drives, on RAID, and on redundant system backups.
Yes, it's cheap hardware. Yes, cheap hardware fails more often than expensive hardware. Yes, cheap hardware is slower than expensive hardware. But you have to look at the offsets: they are building a backup service, where they don't need "instant" data access speeds. As for drive failures, I have some experience there. I have 57,000 cheap-ass consumer drives in service, and over 10,000 of them are 11 years old. They're dying at the rate of about ten failures per day. The key is to build your processes to tolerate and handle failures.
As long as your redundant systems are keeping copies of the data, and you understand exactly what the impact is of a failed component as well as have a recovery plan in place, why not use cheap hardware? Let's do a bit of math. The guy had a photo of himself standing behind about 18 of these boxes. That's 810 drives. If we lowball cheap drives at 300,000 hours MTBF, he'll see an average of two failures per month. It might take him $200 and an hour to recover each failed drive. We could keep doing the math on each component, but I suspect this is still a complete and total bargain that will meet his business needs very well.
It may not be as shiny as EMC or NetApp, and you have to do the legwork yourself, but why spend the extra money on a system that would provide him with "too much service"? From an ROI perspective, this guy is probably going to do very well, even though he may drive a few sysadmins crazy in the process.
I was thinking of Clarke's observation that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." For the vast majority of people, everything on the web and in their iPhones is magic. Hell, they think myspace and facebook are magic. And 35 years ago, I would have agreed.
Sorry, but I just can't get broken up about the "death of the family farm."
Whether or not industrial agriculture is turning out healthy, green food or HFCS and BGH milk, those complaints take a back seat to the fact that we're now feeding a population of 6 billion people. Back then, the global population was smaller than today's current population of China. The family farm model simply isn't able to sustain this level of production.
As it is, unless population growth is controlled we're going to eat ourselves out of a planet within the near future. In about fifty or a hundred years you can forget all about preserving wetlands and endangered species. We're going to be tilling every farmable acre just to try to get enough food to feed the humans.
Yes things have gotten better but I haven't seen a huge revoloutionary change to be honest in my lifetime, maybe the mobile phone I guess.
I'm assuming you're fairly young. You didn't experience how disconnected the world was 40, 30, or even 20 years ago. 20 years ago, it was possible to dial a phone and talk to someone on the other side of the planet. Expensive, so it was not common, but not surprising. 30 years ago, it was a Big Deal to talk to someone on the other side of an ocean. 40 years ago it was a tear-filled occasion to get a phone call from overseas: "Anna, go wake the kids, it's our little Jimmy calling from Over There!" Having grown up with that kind of a reaction to a phone call, for me to now yawn while calling my developers in Bangalore for a status meeting while I ride the train to work, yeah, I can see that as a huge change.
What annoys me more about the timeline is that marking "world wide web" as a single point is like marking the discovery of electricity once and then ignoring every electrical invention since because it's already covered. The internet created a new landscape upon which data lives; it changed how people live, work, and play, and it's being filled with even more magical wonders at a staggering pace. Just because they're riding piggy-back on the single "invention" of the web doesn't mean they're not new.
Also consider that back then there was a very wide acceptance curve separating the "haves" from the "have nots", and the gap has been steadily narrowed ever since. Reductions in poverty and gains in inexpensive manufacturing have brought more technology into the hands of more people.
I also don't think the implications of the instant copy and transfer of information were predicted or understood. The closest we came to predicting 2009 back then was the fear that automation would close our factories and cost us jobs. Nobody saw that the ability to copy or transfer information would transform society the way it has, from the slow collapse of the music industry to the outsourcing of information jobs.
Exactly. One of the main purpose of the scrum master is to see that any roadblocks interfering with the groups tasks get resolved. Ad any place where I've worked, that is also one of the main jobs of the project manager.
As opposed to where I work, where putting up roadblocks to tasks seems to be the job of all of the project managers...
Aside from not worrying about the slab breaking and damaging the pipe (the rebar he shows in the picture will prevent that) I don't understand why people are so afraid of concrete? Ever put a toilet or shower in a basement? You take a saw, cut a hole for the fixture, cut a trench to the drain pipe, fit the new pipes, pour replacement concrete into the hole and trench, and trowel it flat. It adds a few hours or so to the job, a few bucks for renting a wet saw, some sacks of concrete, and a messy wheelbarrow to clean up. It's hardly unfixable. And it's certainly not rocket science.
There are no dangerous cables embedded in a slab that would lash out and kill you if you cut them. It's not like homeowners use post-tensioned concrete for ground-level floors! About the worst damage you would do in an average home would be to nick an existing buried pipe, and you'd see that problem instantly as you clear the rubble from the trench. (You'd probably smell it even before you saw it.)
Yeah, and I've jackhammered out a driveway that was filled with that exact list of junk: bed springs and bed frames. The reason we were ripping up the 30-year-old driveway was the concrete had cracked to hell, with sunken spots all over it. Those old methods sure worked well.
We had an easter egg in our code that was in a routine scheduled to be executed only at 0-dark-30 when our users were long gone. But someone later called the routine as part of the loading process, and the users ended up seeing it anyway as they signed on at start of day. It made people smile, so we left it in.
A few years later, we were telling a client that we couldn't add their new feature X because we don't have the memory. At that point the director said to get rid of the easter egg and then it'd fit. (A few hundred bytes was not going to make a difference, but our director didn't care, it was a perception thing.) What we got instead was a hundred bug reports that the easter egg wasn't displaying, and that they "needed" to see it so they'd know when start of day was complete.
I'm not sure who to be cheering for on this one: the barrator or the spammer. Who should we revile more? Dante reserved the fifth pouch of the Eighth Circle of Hell for barrators, but he says nothing at all about spammers.
There is a very secure solution available that involves replacing the current "valuable account number" system with smart cards and cryptographic protocols, but the roadblocks are many. The big initial hurdle is the resistance by the banks to implement it due to their costs. Certificate management, HSMs, card generation and deployment, all this would add up to over $20 per card. I figure that the amount wasted by merchants securing their systems would more than make up for the expense of such a system, but how does that money make its way to the bank to pay for implementing it?
The next problem is a genuine tinfoil-hat-and-all conspiracy theory: the card associations may not want perfect security. Visa makes their money by carrying transactions over their network and skimming their vigorish. With perfect encryption, merchants could send their transactions directly to the cardholder banks, avoiding Visa's network. Visa has a strong disincentive to implement it.
Another huge fear propagated by the card associations is consumer friendliness. There is concern that adding complexity to the user experience is going to result in dramatically reduced usage, especially after having built up the convenience factor as a primary selling point (see the Visa commercials featuring orchestrated lunch counters for an example.) I personally don't have a problem with people giving a second thought to "do I really want to do that whole PIN thing just to buy lunch?" But if people cut back on those impulse buys it means there will be a big reduction in the processing fees. Again, the merchants don't much care if the customer pays in cash, but the banks and Visa would be opposed to the pay cut.
Very few of the hurdles are technical problems. They're all about fear and money. As long as Visa can play the shell game, getting banks and processors and merchants to all run around securing their systems and taking the blame for failures, we all forget to look at why we're doing this in the first place. But I'm with you -- let's do it anyway.
identifying the transaction to the bank requires the following data: merchant ID, terminal number, transaction date/time, account number, and approval code.
The combination of merchant ID, terminal number, transaction date/time, and approval code seems like a pretty unique transaction ID to me. If the payment processor stores this info as the primary key, then the account number is redundant to specifying the transaction.
Again, I agree with you, but I was describing the current protocol. Remember these systems were built long ago when these sorts of systems could be trusted. I believe the account number was originally used as the primary key in many of them (certainly at the banks, but probably at the processors and merchants as well.)
Two things. First, RTFA, especially the link to Securosis, where it says the guy installed sniffers to record the data while it was being sent to the credit card company. The bad guys didn't steal stored accounts from Heartland, they were just snorting it off their network.
The other thing is that your assumption about how settlement works (while long discussed as a better solution than the current system) is incorrect. The retailer does not get a perfectly unique transaction ID back on a credit authorization request. They get only a short approval code that has to be tied to a specific transaction, and identifying the transaction to the bank requires the following data: merchant ID, terminal number, transaction date/time, account number, and approval code. Without all that data the bank will not pay the processor, who will then not pay the merchant. This is the protocol set up by Visa many, many years ago, and we're still using it.
The ironic thing is that while your proposed solution would make life safer for the merchants (who would no longer have to store account numbers), it would make life more complex for the payment processors as they would then have to store the account numbers (on behalf of the merchants.) And who was breached here this time? The payment processor.
What would really need to change would be the issuing banks and the whole protocol, so the banks wouldn't require the account numbers for settlement. The worst part about that is changing the protocols at 11,000 banks. It's very hard to get game-changing agreements like this passed by the card associations (Visa, etc.) because it imposes a lot of upgrade costs on the member banks. On the flip side, they seem to have no problem imposing their faulty security rules (PCI DSS) on all 6 million merchants.
You might be on to something. Maybe he's measuring the amount of "stupid" on the internet, so if stupidity ever drops below 99.9% saturation, it might mean something's up.
Of course, anything that would catch the interest of most of the tweeters still has a 99.9% chance of being useless anyway.
I just wrote on twitter about my opinion about harnessing the stream of messages flowing through twitter to read public opinion and sentiment in real time.
Yes, but did you then harness your tweet to measure public opinion? What do you think the guy meant by tweeting about measuring sentiment via twitter?
For the public, worrying about computer security is like worrying about an invisible, odorless poison gas that appears in completely random places. If they knew where the gas would strike, they'd fear those places. If the gas had an odor, they'd learn to fear it. If they knew who was responsible for creating the gas, they'd demand that outfit be shut down.
But if there's nothing they can do to protect themselves, they'll just ignore it and hope for the best.
You've also just described "terrorism" (little-t) and included the most practical, rational approach to coping that we humans have. Unfortunately, our politicians and news media have adopted "Terrorism(TM)" as their poster child to manipulate the voters into marching to their prescribed beat of "fear, fear, spend, spend, attack, attack, vote, vote."
I just wish your suggested fixes worked as well in that problem space.
The biggest blunder a company can make is to try to hide that there has been a security breach
Correction: the biggest blunder a company can make is to hide that there has been a security breach AND THEN GET CAUGHT. If they're successful at hiding it, there is no penalty at all.
Yes, Apple has been playing the marketing game for an incredibly long time. And in all that time they have never succeeded in beating the PC. Apple has held only a 5-15% market share since the dawn of the IBM PC, which eclipsed the Apple ][ almost the day it was launched. Despite a three year head start in which schools monopolistically installed Apple equipment by the thousands, producing hundreds of thousands of kids (future users) who loved Apples (and later Macs), the PC came and utterly dominated Apple, selling millions. Apple has had almost 30 years to try to kick the PC back to the curb and yet have never once broken through.
The iPod and iPhone took over by inventing a niche ecosystem where there was no serious competition. But the Windows PC isn't going to be reinvented, not by Apple, not by Google. It's already there, and it's already adequate. (And that user apathy is likely to be the tallest hurdle.)
Apple has certainly carved out several very successful niches for themselves. Most photographic professionals use Macs. Most audio engineers use Macs. They still have the full install base in a lot of school districts. And a lot of IT professionals use Macs at home. But in industry and commercial settings, Windows pays the bills, and too many people fall into the "I've got it at work so I'll get it at home, too" mentality. And if Apple can't beat Microsoft with a better product, Google certainly has a tough road ahead with a product that targets the ill-defined mess of incompatibility that is the common PC. Combined with the apathy of the general public, and I see the future for Chrome OS as not too shiny.
So Chrome is going to magically support all these devices better than Windows? It's been how many years and people still are having problems with Alsa and jack and getting sound out of their Linux boxes that doesn't break the first time something goes awry. Sure, the closed ecosystem makes for a finite (and testable) set of Mac drivers. I completely agree.
I'm saying that even though Apple has had an easier time of it, and they've exploited this to present a better alternative, people still won't even consider them because they're NOT Windows. It's not just money, I think it's the "it's different" problem:
"No, I won't buy a Mac because I can't run Castle Wolfenstein 3D from floppy discs on it"
"I would have to buy a new version of Quicken 98"
"All the good games are on PCs"
"Macs have a weird toolbar"
"I already know Windows."
It doesn't matter if those statements are true or not. They're *believed to be true* by the majority of PC owners, so Mac isn't a choice. And so neither will Chrome OS be a serious choice.
Not that I'm a Apple advocate, but Apple has had a far superior OS to Windows for the last 8 years, and they've barely dented the PC market. If OS X can't change the Windows mindset, Chrome sure as hell can't.
Chrome is just a shiny object in Sergei's eye. It won't have an impact outside the geek arena.
Enough dogs are afflicted with stupid humans as it is.
Yeah, but with or without dogs there are still going to be stupid people. At least with the dogs doing the thinking for them the rest of us wouldn't have to suffer as much.
A creature that has spent several thousand years being domesticated by humans -- I'd damn well expect it to be able to emulate certain kinds of human behavior and show types of intelligence other animals do not, that's exactly what domestication is supposed to do.
I don't know if that's a valid argument. Even after several thousand years, domesticated cats are no more useful now then they have ever been. They're hunters of domestic pests, no more. Dogs, on the other hand, have been bred for hunting, where they point, retrieve, and flush out game. They've been bred for herding, rounding up cattle and sheep on command. They've been bred for guard duty. They have learned a lot more than other animals given the same opportunity.
does this additional knowledge mean that we will end up with dogs in other support roles?
How about a "Thinking Brain" dog for some of the terminally stupid people I have to deal with? The blind and deaf already use dogs, why not stupid people? Are you a stupid person who can't make a decision in the fast food restaurant? Dog orders you a cheeseburger. Are you so stupid that you can't decide if you should turn left or right at the stoplight? Dog tells you to turn left. Are you a dumb pedestrian who stops in the middle of the intersection to answer their cell phone? Dog drags you to the curb.
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They're betting on the MTTF of the drives, on RAID, and on redundant system backups.
Yes, it's cheap hardware. Yes, cheap hardware fails more often than expensive hardware. Yes, cheap hardware is slower than expensive hardware. But you have to look at the offsets: they are building a backup service, where they don't need "instant" data access speeds. As for drive failures, I have some experience there. I have 57,000 cheap-ass consumer drives in service, and over 10,000 of them are 11 years old. They're dying at the rate of about ten failures per day. The key is to build your processes to tolerate and handle failures.
As long as your redundant systems are keeping copies of the data, and you understand exactly what the impact is of a failed component as well as have a recovery plan in place, why not use cheap hardware? Let's do a bit of math. The guy had a photo of himself standing behind about 18 of these boxes. That's 810 drives. If we lowball cheap drives at 300,000 hours MTBF, he'll see an average of two failures per month. It might take him $200 and an hour to recover each failed drive. We could keep doing the math on each component, but I suspect this is still a complete and total bargain that will meet his business needs very well.
It may not be as shiny as EMC or NetApp, and you have to do the legwork yourself, but why spend the extra money on a system that would provide him with "too much service"? From an ROI perspective, this guy is probably going to do very well, even though he may drive a few sysadmins crazy in the process.
You had me until you said 'magical'.
I was thinking of Clarke's observation that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." For the vast majority of people, everything on the web and in their iPhones is magic. Hell, they think myspace and facebook are magic. And 35 years ago, I would have agreed.
Sorry, but I just can't get broken up about the "death of the family farm."
Whether or not industrial agriculture is turning out healthy, green food or HFCS and BGH milk, those complaints take a back seat to the fact that we're now feeding a population of 6 billion people. Back then, the global population was smaller than today's current population of China. The family farm model simply isn't able to sustain this level of production.
As it is, unless population growth is controlled we're going to eat ourselves out of a planet within the near future. In about fifty or a hundred years you can forget all about preserving wetlands and endangered species. We're going to be tilling every farmable acre just to try to get enough food to feed the humans.
Yes things have gotten better but I haven't seen a huge revoloutionary change to be honest in my lifetime, maybe the mobile phone I guess.
I'm assuming you're fairly young. You didn't experience how disconnected the world was 40, 30, or even 20 years ago. 20 years ago, it was possible to dial a phone and talk to someone on the other side of the planet. Expensive, so it was not common, but not surprising. 30 years ago, it was a Big Deal to talk to someone on the other side of an ocean. 40 years ago it was a tear-filled occasion to get a phone call from overseas: "Anna, go wake the kids, it's our little Jimmy calling from Over There!" Having grown up with that kind of a reaction to a phone call, for me to now yawn while calling my developers in Bangalore for a status meeting while I ride the train to work, yeah, I can see that as a huge change.
What annoys me more about the timeline is that marking "world wide web" as a single point is like marking the discovery of electricity once and then ignoring every electrical invention since because it's already covered. The internet created a new landscape upon which data lives; it changed how people live, work, and play, and it's being filled with even more magical wonders at a staggering pace. Just because they're riding piggy-back on the single "invention" of the web doesn't mean they're not new.
I also don't think the implications of the instant copy and transfer of information were predicted or understood. The closest we came to predicting 2009 back then was the fear that automation would close our factories and cost us jobs. Nobody saw that the ability to copy or transfer information would transform society the way it has, from the slow collapse of the music industry to the outsourcing of information jobs.
That's exactly why my colonel (ret.) uncle decided to put the (ret.) after his name once he made full-bird.
Exactly. One of the main purpose of the scrum master is to see that any roadblocks interfering with the groups tasks get resolved. Ad any place where I've worked, that is also one of the main jobs of the project manager.
As opposed to where I work, where putting up roadblocks to tasks seems to be the job of all of the project managers...
Aside from not worrying about the slab breaking and damaging the pipe (the rebar he shows in the picture will prevent that) I don't understand why people are so afraid of concrete? Ever put a toilet or shower in a basement? You take a saw, cut a hole for the fixture, cut a trench to the drain pipe, fit the new pipes, pour replacement concrete into the hole and trench, and trowel it flat. It adds a few hours or so to the job, a few bucks for renting a wet saw, some sacks of concrete, and a messy wheelbarrow to clean up. It's hardly unfixable. And it's certainly not rocket science.
There are no dangerous cables embedded in a slab that would lash out and kill you if you cut them. It's not like homeowners use post-tensioned concrete for ground-level floors! About the worst damage you would do in an average home would be to nick an existing buried pipe, and you'd see that problem instantly as you clear the rubble from the trench. (You'd probably smell it even before you saw it.)
Yeah, and I've jackhammered out a driveway that was filled with that exact list of junk: bed springs and bed frames. The reason we were ripping up the 30-year-old driveway was the concrete had cracked to hell, with sunken spots all over it. Those old methods sure worked well.
Hippies. Why'd it have to be hippies?
We had an easter egg in our code that was in a routine scheduled to be executed only at 0-dark-30 when our users were long gone. But someone later called the routine as part of the loading process, and the users ended up seeing it anyway as they signed on at start of day. It made people smile, so we left it in.
A few years later, we were telling a client that we couldn't add their new feature X because we don't have the memory. At that point the director said to get rid of the easter egg and then it'd fit. (A few hundred bytes was not going to make a difference, but our director didn't care, it was a perception thing.) What we got instead was a hundred bug reports that the easter egg wasn't displaying, and that they "needed" to see it so they'd know when start of day was complete.
I'm not sure who to be cheering for on this one: the barrator or the spammer. Who should we revile more? Dante reserved the fifth pouch of the Eighth Circle of Hell for barrators, but he says nothing at all about spammers.
There is a very secure solution available that involves replacing the current "valuable account number" system with smart cards and cryptographic protocols, but the roadblocks are many. The big initial hurdle is the resistance by the banks to implement it due to their costs. Certificate management, HSMs, card generation and deployment, all this would add up to over $20 per card. I figure that the amount wasted by merchants securing their systems would more than make up for the expense of such a system, but how does that money make its way to the bank to pay for implementing it?
The next problem is a genuine tinfoil-hat-and-all conspiracy theory: the card associations may not want perfect security. Visa makes their money by carrying transactions over their network and skimming their vigorish. With perfect encryption, merchants could send their transactions directly to the cardholder banks, avoiding Visa's network. Visa has a strong disincentive to implement it.
Another huge fear propagated by the card associations is consumer friendliness. There is concern that adding complexity to the user experience is going to result in dramatically reduced usage, especially after having built up the convenience factor as a primary selling point (see the Visa commercials featuring orchestrated lunch counters for an example.) I personally don't have a problem with people giving a second thought to "do I really want to do that whole PIN thing just to buy lunch?" But if people cut back on those impulse buys it means there will be a big reduction in the processing fees. Again, the merchants don't much care if the customer pays in cash, but the banks and Visa would be opposed to the pay cut.
Very few of the hurdles are technical problems. They're all about fear and money. As long as Visa can play the shell game, getting banks and processors and merchants to all run around securing their systems and taking the blame for failures, we all forget to look at why we're doing this in the first place. But I'm with you -- let's do it anyway.
identifying the transaction to the bank requires the following data: merchant ID, terminal number, transaction date/time, account number, and approval code.
The combination of merchant ID, terminal number, transaction date/time, and approval code seems like a pretty unique transaction ID to me. If the payment processor stores this info as the primary key, then the account number is redundant to specifying the transaction.
Again, I agree with you, but I was describing the current protocol. Remember these systems were built long ago when these sorts of systems could be trusted. I believe the account number was originally used as the primary key in many of them (certainly at the banks, but probably at the processors and merchants as well.)
Two things. First, RTFA, especially the link to Securosis, where it says the guy installed sniffers to record the data while it was being sent to the credit card company. The bad guys didn't steal stored accounts from Heartland, they were just snorting it off their network.
The other thing is that your assumption about how settlement works (while long discussed as a better solution than the current system) is incorrect. The retailer does not get a perfectly unique transaction ID back on a credit authorization request. They get only a short approval code that has to be tied to a specific transaction, and identifying the transaction to the bank requires the following data: merchant ID, terminal number, transaction date/time, account number, and approval code. Without all that data the bank will not pay the processor, who will then not pay the merchant. This is the protocol set up by Visa many, many years ago, and we're still using it.
The ironic thing is that while your proposed solution would make life safer for the merchants (who would no longer have to store account numbers), it would make life more complex for the payment processors as they would then have to store the account numbers (on behalf of the merchants.) And who was breached here this time? The payment processor.
What would really need to change would be the issuing banks and the whole protocol, so the banks wouldn't require the account numbers for settlement. The worst part about that is changing the protocols at 11,000 banks. It's very hard to get game-changing agreements like this passed by the card associations (Visa, etc.) because it imposes a lot of upgrade costs on the member banks. On the flip side, they seem to have no problem imposing their faulty security rules (PCI DSS) on all 6 million merchants.
You might be on to something. Maybe he's measuring the amount of "stupid" on the internet, so if stupidity ever drops below 99.9% saturation, it might mean something's up.
Of course, anything that would catch the interest of most of the tweeters still has a 99.9% chance of being useless anyway.
I just wrote on twitter about my opinion about harnessing the stream of messages flowing through twitter to read public opinion and sentiment in real time.
Yes, but did you then harness your tweet to measure public opinion? What do you think the guy meant by tweeting about measuring sentiment via twitter?
For the public, worrying about computer security is like worrying about an invisible, odorless poison gas that appears in completely random places. If they knew where the gas would strike, they'd fear those places. If the gas had an odor, they'd learn to fear it. If they knew who was responsible for creating the gas, they'd demand that outfit be shut down.
But if there's nothing they can do to protect themselves, they'll just ignore it and hope for the best.
You've also just described "terrorism" (little-t) and included the most practical, rational approach to coping that we humans have. Unfortunately, our politicians and news media have adopted "Terrorism(TM)" as their poster child to manipulate the voters into marching to their prescribed beat of "fear, fear, spend, spend, attack, attack, vote, vote."
I just wish your suggested fixes worked as well in that problem space.
The biggest blunder a company can make is to try to hide that there has been a security breach
Correction: the biggest blunder a company can make is to hide that there has been a security breach AND THEN GET CAUGHT. If they're successful at hiding it, there is no penalty at all.
This is just one form of the classic Prisoner's Dilemma.
Yes, Apple has been playing the marketing game for an incredibly long time. And in all that time they have never succeeded in beating the PC. Apple has held only a 5-15% market share since the dawn of the IBM PC, which eclipsed the Apple ][ almost the day it was launched. Despite a three year head start in which schools monopolistically installed Apple equipment by the thousands, producing hundreds of thousands of kids (future users) who loved Apples (and later Macs), the PC came and utterly dominated Apple, selling millions. Apple has had almost 30 years to try to kick the PC back to the curb and yet have never once broken through.
The iPod and iPhone took over by inventing a niche ecosystem where there was no serious competition. But the Windows PC isn't going to be reinvented, not by Apple, not by Google. It's already there, and it's already adequate. (And that user apathy is likely to be the tallest hurdle.)
Apple has certainly carved out several very successful niches for themselves. Most photographic professionals use Macs. Most audio engineers use Macs. They still have the full install base in a lot of school districts. And a lot of IT professionals use Macs at home. But in industry and commercial settings, Windows pays the bills, and too many people fall into the "I've got it at work so I'll get it at home, too" mentality. And if Apple can't beat Microsoft with a better product, Google certainly has a tough road ahead with a product that targets the ill-defined mess of incompatibility that is the common PC. Combined with the apathy of the general public, and I see the future for Chrome OS as not too shiny.
So Chrome is going to magically support all these devices better than Windows? It's been how many years and people still are having problems with Alsa and jack and getting sound out of their Linux boxes that doesn't break the first time something goes awry. Sure, the closed ecosystem makes for a finite (and testable) set of Mac drivers. I completely agree.
I'm saying that even though Apple has had an easier time of it, and they've exploited this to present a better alternative, people still won't even consider them because they're NOT Windows. It's not just money, I think it's the "it's different" problem:
It doesn't matter if those statements are true or not. They're *believed to be true* by the majority of PC owners, so Mac isn't a choice. And so neither will Chrome OS be a serious choice.
Not that I'm a Apple advocate, but Apple has had a far superior OS to Windows for the last 8 years, and they've barely dented the PC market. If OS X can't change the Windows mindset, Chrome sure as hell can't.
Chrome is just a shiny object in Sergei's eye. It won't have an impact outside the geek arena.
It works when people aren't fuckin dumbasses.
In other words it doesn't work at all, ever.
Enough dogs are afflicted with stupid humans as it is.
Yeah, but with or without dogs there are still going to be stupid people. At least with the dogs doing the thinking for them the rest of us wouldn't have to suffer as much.
A creature that has spent several thousand years being domesticated by humans -- I'd damn well expect it to be able to emulate certain kinds of human behavior and show types of intelligence other animals do not, that's exactly what domestication is supposed to do.
I don't know if that's a valid argument. Even after several thousand years, domesticated cats are no more useful now then they have ever been. They're hunters of domestic pests, no more. Dogs, on the other hand, have been bred for hunting, where they point, retrieve, and flush out game. They've been bred for herding, rounding up cattle and sheep on command. They've been bred for guard duty. They have learned a lot more than other animals given the same opportunity.
does this additional knowledge mean that we will end up with dogs in other support roles?
How about a "Thinking Brain" dog for some of the terminally stupid people I have to deal with? The blind and deaf already use dogs, why not stupid people? Are you a stupid person who can't make a decision in the fast food restaurant? Dog orders you a cheeseburger. Are you so stupid that you can't decide if you should turn left or right at the stoplight? Dog tells you to turn left. Are you a dumb pedestrian who stops in the middle of the intersection to answer their cell phone? Dog drags you to the curb.
This would be GREAT!