It sounds like you have many ingredients of DevOps in your experience, but none of the benefits because they seem to be a drag on your efficiency. You may be in the middle of a journey that you've yet to realize how to raise the state of the art in your own work, your team, and your software development organization.
My definition of DevOps is: DevOps is the process of removing all friction between the developer and customer value.
You need to treat friction as technical debt: file a bug and work on it!
I think you are close, but I have to disagree with a point you make. You want SAs in the loop to **develop** the environments and tuning: we want infrastructure as code where sysadmins document their wisdom and make it reproducible everywhere (in dev, staging, test, etc.): not by hand in only in production. Otherwise, we end up with deltas between development and production, which is a gap that can cause trouble and problems to creep up only in production.
This is where we start to close the loop on infrastructure and software engineering by instrumenting our code with metrics, performing forensic analysis with logs, and tracking health/uptime/performance with monitors. Otherwise, yes - handing off production to the system administrators to do their dark magick is the old way and it is NOT the DevOps way.
DevOps allows us to approach the problem where tuning and troubleshooting on your laptop or in production should be, as much as possible, a shared exercise with shared tools.
There is so much misunderstanding because there is not a universal, static definition of DevOps that everyone can point to and say "that is DevOps" or "you are doing it wrong!" This is because DevOps is ultimately defined by the capacity of the people who practice it and I think we can see (already in these postings) that many people do not have the capacity to define it.
The history of DevOps begins with the people who coined it: Patrick Debois and Andrew Clay Shafer's first discussion about Agile Engineering at a conference in 2008, which led to a Google group and then to the first community meeting as DevOpsDays Belgium in 2009. W#e can trace to the beginnings and primary source folks, so please stop demonizing and making DevOps anything more mysterious than a knowledge gap.
For an overview with my definition of DevOps, please see my blog post with talk and slides that I presented at Silicon Valley Code Camp earlier this month: http://mlavi.github.io/post/de...
You want infrastructure as code: when you shell into a machine, you've already lost the battle because you are going to be doing things by hand which is slow and fraught with human error.
Your general approach is correct: scrap the servers + packages, instead code them into a provisioning system such as Chef, Puppet, Ansible, Salt, etc. and handle all of the variables and corner cases for a fleet of servers with different OSs using these systems.
Model them for local development using Vagrant and eventually Docker.
Disk cloning is one easy way to solve this problem, but then you must customize the new clone, and that represents a different set of problems. Eventually you learn that you don't want to copy the docroots or other data between each clone. In fact, your application or data or configuration up to date at the time of the snapshot, but may not represent the current application data or configuration.
This leads many to synthesize infrastructure via provisioning tools like Salt/Puppet/Chef/etc. following infrastructure as code principle and then to publish the application onto the server from revision control or even better, from a build system, because that is up to date.
The problem is that doing anything by hand is slow and introduces human error.
We all start to solve this by documenting your work procedures (i.e. a run book) to make our knowledge reproducible the next time we set up a server. The next solution is to code those procedures in a shell script to speed up things. However, you quickly find out that you'll need variables and you want to address corner cases because you need the script to work on more than one server. So your shell script needs to be tested in multiple places and you've now begun to code infrastructure.
Today there are many provisioning tools (and run book modules provided by the community) which solve this problem elegantly and allow you to provision a fleet: Chef, Puppet, Ansible, Salt, and many others. They allow you to scale your efforts so that you'll never need a full day to provision a server again.
We don't do things by hand anymore today: it does not scale and it is not repeatable.
Vagrant changed my life! Learn about Vagrant, use shell and evolve towards Chef/Puppet provisioning, then optimize toward application containers to go even faster. You'll gain the benefit of keeping your customer development environment on your Windows/Mac/Linux desktop or laptop while being able to test multiple different projects for different business clients reflecting their production environment.
I had a lengthier example, but I lost the post. Anyhow, this is the beginning of your journey to immutable infrastructure as code: a lot of buzzwords that won't mean anything until you complete the journey..
Vagrant is part of a free toolset ecosystem (Packer, Terraform, Consul, etc.) which solve modern infrastructure issues that the OP is expressing: the Vagrant creators are smart and approachable in the forums and I've had the chance to meet some in person to confirm they are humble and generous souls.
Check out Pertino.com, a network as a service startup. You can set up a free account for three devices forever. If you need to expand past three devices at the same time, then Pertino has become valuable to you.
At a minimum, you get a very easy to use (and administer) private, secure network between you and whomever you invite onto your network, so you can do Remote Desktop, VNC, X, or whatever else you choose for you and your family to use without resorting to GotoMyPC, WebEx, etc. (mind you, all of those solutions are valid Desktop Sharing services, too) . But you can also do NFS, SMB, FTP, etc. for file sharing. Or anything: you finally have a virtual private network where you and your remote clients/family get a LAN-like experience in the cloud.
Full disclosure: I work there, so I am hopelessly biased. The value I see in this solution is that it is easy and secure for everyone, covers mobile and desktop, and allows you to try almost any solution out there to solve your needs because you have a peer to peer network with remote devices.
:) Netsite evolved into the Netscape Enterprise Server and I was there at Netscape when the web site cluster served over 100 million hits per day in 1996. Those were amazing times, many server manufacturers would bring in hardware and we would benchmark a portion of www.netscape.com's traffic on them, which usually led to discussions about how to tune or optimize the OS or the IP stack, I know we helped SGI at the time.
The server and software engineering folks helped develop a dynamic DNS server that would help globally load balance web traffic based upon the inquiring IP address. They also helped hack SSL into rsync back in the day, so that is how we securely published web content updates out to the cluster.
Sadly, we also pioneering web advertising at Netscape. My colleague Alan spec'd out the dimensions to the ad banners, in case you wondered where those 460x68 dimensions came from: it allowed a minimal amount of horizontal white space on each side of the web page when the web browser had a vertical scroll bar on a 640x480 laptop display running Navigator, IIRC.
So those ad banners were physically changed on the docroot via a cron script in order to rotate them. The joy of hacks in a funded start up, but it made money! In fact, unlike most corporations today (e.g.: Microsoft), there was a strategic decision *not* to create an advertising server, so we helped create an industry and did not compete in it. Well, didn't complete until TW/AOL acquired Netscape -- but that was the day Netscape really died (it could be argued that bought Netscape solely for our web site traffic and advertising revenue since they didn't know what to do with the browser and server software. Witness the eventual release of the browser software to the mozilla.org project (thanks also to jwz!) and iPlanet/Sun eventually selling the server line to Red Hat, who continues to open source the directory and certificate servers today).
I wrote the plug-in finder, could it have been the most used CGI on the web at the time in 1996 -- who knows? I went on to become a technology evangelist at Netscape.
Disclaimer: I work with SGI, so I can shed some light on their customer's perspective (NASA, gov't, research labs, etc.) and solution to this problem.
The increasing density of servers is exacerbating the problem of power and cooling in every data center. This week is the SuperComputing trade show where the the new top 500 supercomputers edition was released with "Big Turnover Among the Top 10 Systems," where you can see the first examples to address these issues.
SGI's new ICE blade system was launched a few months ago, it was designed to address the power consumption, real estate density, and cooling issues everyone will probably experience on their next server cycle. ICE has shipped and one installation is now #3 on the Top 500. It's a welcome sign that SGI is back from bankruptcy. I'm sorry if this seems like an advert, so I'm not going to link to SGI -- you can go find out more easily if you want.
You seem to have some facts wrong, so your viewpoints are off.
MicroSoft has not released Silverlight for Linux, go look at the downloads page (/silverlight/downloads.aspx). They probably never will.
Miguel de Icaza of Mono/GNOME/Novell fame has led the effort to make a Linux implementation called MoonLight (http://www.mono-project.com/Moonlight). Supposedly, Microsoft will not sue for the infringement of their intellectual property, http://www.microsoft.com/interop/msnovellcollab/moonlight.mspx -- but that is a promise, not a license, so those are legally tenuous grounds to walk on. If they were serious, then they would grant a license. The problem is that it would have to be an open source license.
Do not delude yourself or others: Microsoft sees Linux as a threat to their OS. Microsoft uses Silverlight to control Internet user interfaces and fend off adoption of Adobe/Macromedia's Flash, Java applets, and the web standard of SVG, and even AJAX/HTML/CSS as well as all other UIs.
JavaScript has always operated in a sandbox: so I disagree about your notion of "developed in a trusting world" because any compromise is lethal, no matter what the point. Designing a sandbox around JavaScript is pragmatic security design -- much like Flash, Java applets, and much unlike ActiveX's origins. So if you've ignored the security patches of JavaScript (to keep it secure) and if you've never benefited from an AJAX web site or HTML form validation, then I can forgive your comment.
Of course, people who do not design for graceful degradation of any technology in a web page might have caused your comments, but the web benefits from dynamic applications in web pages: there's no installation necessary.
You can keep your HTML 1.0 web circa 1993 -- I remember it fondly, because nostalgia wins the truthiness argument. I'm happier with the possibilities of web applications based on open standards delivered by the Internet versus proprietary OS applications because it fosters competition and advancement in the market.
I seem to remember VBScript, it's a perfect example of MicroSoft's agenda and why JavaScript should evolve instead of fork.
From a pragmatic point of view, there might have reason -- but it's clear that MicroSoft's agenda is neither technical, nor pragmatic.
Image M$ advancing the same argument for forking Java into a new language when new functionality/semantics were planned?
It's ridiculous.
Perhaps because a P2P distribution scheme like BitTorrent can be faster than:
- a big file server cluster at a single data center with a big pipe out to the entire internet. No matter how big the pipe and server cluster at the source, you've got network bandwidth constraints on getting to you at your ISP aside from your last mile connection. This single source solution does not allow for efficient huge file distribution over the entire Internet unless each ISP can cache many huge files: I doubt many do although this also allows the ISP to advance the anti-Network Neutrality issue.
- the above content provider leveraging a content distribution network like Akamai or Kontiki, etc.: at least this helps minimize network congestion by removing hops to you, but they still have to pass through your ISP's network. This situation still can't beat local peers on your ISPs private network sharing data to you.
So while you do not always win the fastest downloads with P2P, there are still many situations where you can win.
Why hog your upstream bandwidth when it's not being used?
ISPs don't seem to constrain upstream as much they have concerns for downstream. Of course there are cases where they do and they meter for usage, but I'm not sure that's an issue with local peers on the network.
Without a doubt, the game of the year that I would pick has to be: Shadow of the Colossus,
by team ICO, for the PS2.
The story and twist at the ending is haunting, the environment and setting are completely immersive, the gameplay is unique (climbing and conquering the bosses -- each are puzzles),
and the soundtrack is epic.
The game won many awards, so I'll quote the Wikipedia article:
Shadow has received several awards, including recognition for "Best Character Design", "Best Game Design", "Best Visual Arts" and "Game of the Year", as well as one of three "Innovation Awards" at the 2006 Game Developers Choice Awards.[57][58] At the 2006 DICE Summit, the game won the award for "Outstanding Achievement in Art Direction" and was nominated for "Console Game of the Year" by the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences,[59] while it received one of two "Special Rookie Awards" at the Famitsu Awards 2005.[60][61][62] It was nominated for "Best Original Music", "Best Artistic Graphics", "Best PS2 Game" and "Most Aggravating Frame Rate" in GameSpot's awards for 2005,[63][64][65][66] while it won "Best Adventure Game" and "Best Artistic Design" and was a runner-up for "Game of the Year" in The Best of 2005 awards held by IGN,[67][68][69] who cited Agro as the best sidekick in the history of video games,[70], while Britain's Games Radar awarded it Best Game Of The Year 2006[71]. The game's ending was selected as the fourth greatest moment in gaming by the editors of GamePro in July 2006.[72]
However, this game is not for everyone because there's very little immediate gratification: it takes time to explore the forbidden lands on horseback and to find the bosses, the interface is minimal, there are no points, and each battle can last 20-50 minutes.
It's a masterwork, I flash back to moments of gameplay and the ending, and I only wish that there would be more of it because very few games have captured my imagination this way. I hope you enjoy it, it's become a "greatest hit" for under $20 now. Cheers!
It was about ten years ago that I saw Hakon present CSS to some of the engineers and product managers at Netscape, where I was a technology evangelist. That was a great moment in my career, where I knew how much trouble we had with the rendering engine as well as how much responsibility we had to fight the good fight for standards.
Thanks to Hakon and Bert, congrats to the w3c, and keep on on styling your designs!
"Such [HiDef Video] players can be had at a lower price point than both the PS3 and the XBOX+ADDON."
That is not true (see below). Sure gaming is one reason to compare, but I believe you are sticking to a single dimensional analysis rather than seeing the media convergence device Microsoft and Sony are fighting to get into your living room. The article does not mention the Wii because it's audience cares about hi def movies -- not games! For this audience, the Playstation3 gaming platform is a secondary consideration to its BluRay, HDMI 1.3, and 1080p HDTV capabilites.
I'll use the US retail prices from now on... The PS3 ($499 or $599 version) is the cheapest BluRay player, by a margin of hundreds of dollars today. Recent price check on BluRay players: Sony Samsung BDP1000 ($1000), Pioneer's player ($1000+), and I think I've heard of a Philips player as well ($?).
The core XBOX 360 ($299) + HD DVD ($199) add on (which is a 2nd generation Toshiba drive) add to $498, which is roughly equal to the retail price of the base, first generation model Toshiba HD-A1 HD-DVD player ($499). The street price has started to drop on the first generation players, so you are correct in your assessment if price was the only consideration for HD-DVD movie playback.
But I think you can see that Sony and Microsoft are discounting hardware in order to gain market acceptance and market share for a new gaming platform and for a new high definition DVD playback device.
Why would Microsoft release the HD-DVD add on and why would Sony cripple it's lauch to bundle BluRay for their consoles if gaming was the only way to evaluate them? Because there is more to consider.
The next generation consoles are a converged business platform. They represent a war involving video, audio, and game content delivered via online and software media. Each platform drives hardware, software, codec, and network components for sales, licensing, and royalties.
Expect the consoles to clash and potentially partner with iTV, iTunes, cable, satellite, and other media providers. I don't know how soon or how successful they will be, but be prepared for people to evaluate them not on games, but on: "can I get or rent (this movie, my music, my pictures, etc.) on my XBOX 360 or Playstation3?"
Mod parent down -- the poster missed the point of the article.
The article's web site audience is focused on High Definition movies. Both game consoles are trying to expand their scope to be a home media center (for movies, pictures, music, etc.) as well.
In fact, the article agrees with the poster's comment, making it a redundant observation and not +3 Insightful. RTFM, from the fine Article...
Conclusions -- Which One to Buy?
Sorry, I can't tell you which is the best next-gen game console -- that's all about the
games...
Weeding out non-industry, babes = lower attendance
on
Prognosticating E3
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I'm less affiliated with the industry now, but I've been to three E3s and they are great experiences. I ultimately had to say no to attending this year due to scheduling conflicts.
However, I wonder if this year two factors will reduce the E3 gross attendance of 35,000 from last year? Consider if you will:
Exhibits only hall fee has more than doubled:
Last year: early sign up was $150, late sign up: $200 (if I remember correctly)
This year: early sign up was $500, late sign up: $650.
(See Package 4 at http://www.e3expo.com/attendees/pricing.aspx)
Booth Babes are going to be banned and exhibitors fined.
See http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70075-0.htm l
I have to discount the latter factor because most people don't know this will happen and probably don't care too much to complain or applaud.
I believe that because you did not address the Register's sensationalism, you agree with my first point.
Does SGI have the ability to come in line with revenue to become a healthy company? That is the question. The focus of your statement was on the current company performance, implying there is no future because of the past. Perhaps you've heard the warning that "past performance is not an indication of future gains."
I extoll the vitures of a company that can turn around. Will they? We'll see. SGI is certainly not the same company we knew and your nostalgia about IRIX isn't relevant because new SGI customers are buying (essentially) Linux on Itanium for high performance computing because they do offer value. Go to the web site and look at the press releases and see if simple math makes SGI returning to health impossible.
Like everything in life, it is a matter of execution and time. Thanks for your response.
Slashdot Mirror
It sounds like you have many ingredients of DevOps in your experience, but none of the benefits because they seem to be a drag on your efficiency. You may be in the middle of a journey that you've yet to realize how to raise the state of the art in your own work, your team, and your software development organization.
My definition of DevOps is: DevOps is the process of removing all friction between the developer and customer value.
You need to treat friction as technical debt: file a bug and work on it!
I think you are close, but I have to disagree with a point you make. You want SAs in the loop to **develop** the environments and tuning: we want infrastructure as code where sysadmins document their wisdom and make it reproducible everywhere (in dev, staging, test, etc.): not by hand in only in production. Otherwise, we end up with deltas between development and production, which is a gap that can cause trouble and problems to creep up only in production.
This is where we start to close the loop on infrastructure and software engineering by instrumenting our code with metrics, performing forensic analysis with logs, and tracking health/uptime/performance with monitors. Otherwise, yes - handing off production to the system administrators to do their dark magick is the old way and it is NOT the DevOps way.
DevOps allows us to approach the problem where tuning and troubleshooting on your laptop or in production should be, as much as possible, a shared exercise with shared tools.
There is so much misunderstanding because there is not a universal, static definition of DevOps that everyone can point to and say "that is DevOps" or "you are doing it wrong!" This is because DevOps is ultimately defined by the capacity of the people who practice it and I think we can see (already in these postings) that many people do not have the capacity to define it.
The history of DevOps begins with the people who coined it: Patrick Debois and Andrew Clay Shafer's first discussion about Agile Engineering at a conference in 2008, which led to a Google group and then to the first community meeting as DevOpsDays Belgium in 2009. W#e can trace to the beginnings and primary source folks, so please stop demonizing and making DevOps anything more mysterious than a knowledge gap.
For an overview with my definition of DevOps, please see my blog post with talk and slides that I presented at Silicon Valley Code Camp earlier this month:
http://mlavi.github.io/post/de...
You want infrastructure as code: when you shell into a machine, you've already lost the battle because you are going to be doing things by hand which is slow and fraught with human error.
Your general approach is correct: scrap the servers + packages, instead code them into a provisioning system such as Chef, Puppet, Ansible, Salt, etc. and handle all of the variables and corner cases for a fleet of servers with different OSs using these systems.
Model them for local development using Vagrant and eventually Docker.
Disk cloning is one easy way to solve this problem, but then you must customize the new clone, and that represents a different set of problems.
Eventually you learn that you don't want to copy the docroots or other data between each clone. In fact, your application or data or configuration up to date at the time of the snapshot, but may not represent the current application data or configuration.
This leads many to synthesize infrastructure via provisioning tools like Salt/Puppet/Chef/etc. following infrastructure as code principle and then to publish the application onto the server from revision control or even better, from a build system, because that is up to date.
The problem is that doing anything by hand is slow and introduces human error.
We all start to solve this by documenting your work procedures (i.e. a run book) to make our knowledge reproducible the next time we set up a server. The next solution is to code those procedures in a shell script to speed up things. However, you quickly find out that you'll need variables and you want to address corner cases because you need the script to work on more than one server. So your shell script needs to be tested in multiple places and you've now begun to code infrastructure.
Today there are many provisioning tools (and run book modules provided by the community) which solve this problem elegantly and allow you to provision a fleet: Chef, Puppet, Ansible, Salt, and many others. They allow you to scale your efforts so that you'll never need a full day to provision a server again.
We don't do things by hand anymore today: it does not scale and it is not repeatable.
Vagrant changed my life! Learn about Vagrant, use shell and evolve towards Chef/Puppet provisioning, then optimize toward application containers to go even faster. You'll gain the benefit of keeping your customer development environment on your Windows/Mac/Linux desktop or laptop while being able to test multiple different projects for different business clients reflecting their production environment.
I had a lengthier example, but I lost the post. Anyhow, this is the beginning of your journey to immutable infrastructure as code: a lot of buzzwords that won't mean anything until you complete the journey..
Vagrant is part of a free toolset ecosystem (Packer, Terraform, Consul, etc.) which solve modern infrastructure issues that the OP is expressing: the Vagrant creators are smart and approachable in the forums and I've had the chance to meet some in person to confirm they are humble and generous souls.
Check out Pertino.com, a network as a service startup. You can set up a free account for three devices forever. If you need to expand past three devices at the same time, then Pertino has become valuable to you.
At a minimum, you get a very easy to use (and administer) private, secure network between you and whomever you invite onto your network, so you can do Remote Desktop, VNC, X, or whatever else you choose for you and your family to use without resorting to GotoMyPC, WebEx, etc. (mind you, all of those solutions are valid Desktop Sharing services, too) . But you can also do NFS, SMB, FTP, etc. for file sharing. Or anything: you finally have a virtual private network where you and your remote clients/family get a LAN-like experience in the cloud.
Full disclosure: I work there, so I am hopelessly biased. The value I see in this solution is that it is easy and secure for everyone, covers mobile and desktop, and allows you to try almost any solution out there to solve your needs because you have a peer to peer network with remote devices.
If you like Guacamole, you'll probably also like AJAXterm, which can give you a webpage-based shell... Can't find a definitive webpage for it...
http://antony.lesuisse.org/software/ajaxterm/
:) Netsite evolved into the Netscape Enterprise Server and I was there at Netscape when the web site cluster served over 100 million hits per day in 1996. Those were amazing times, many server manufacturers would bring in hardware and we would benchmark a portion of www.netscape.com's traffic on them, which usually led to discussions about how to tune or optimize the OS or the IP stack, I know we helped SGI at the time.
The server and software engineering folks helped develop a dynamic DNS server that would help globally load balance web traffic based upon the inquiring IP address. They also helped hack SSL into rsync back in the day, so that is how we securely published web content updates out to the cluster.
Sadly, we also pioneering web advertising at Netscape. My colleague Alan spec'd out the dimensions to the ad banners, in case you wondered where those 460x68 dimensions came from: it allowed a minimal amount of horizontal white space on each side of the web page when the web browser had a vertical scroll bar on a 640x480 laptop display running Navigator, IIRC.
So those ad banners were physically changed on the docroot via a cron script in order to rotate them. The joy of hacks in a funded start up, but it made money! In fact, unlike most corporations today (e.g.: Microsoft), there was a strategic decision *not* to create an advertising server, so we helped create an industry and did not compete in it. Well, didn't complete until TW/AOL acquired Netscape -- but that was the day Netscape really died (it could be argued that bought Netscape solely for our web site traffic and advertising revenue since they didn't know what to do with the browser and server software. Witness the eventual release of the browser software to the mozilla.org project (thanks also to jwz!) and iPlanet/Sun eventually selling the server line to Red Hat, who continues to open source the directory and certificate servers today).
I wrote the plug-in finder, could it have been the most used CGI on the web at the time in 1996 -- who knows? I went on to become a technology evangelist at Netscape.
Good days indeed, thanks for the memories!
And here is another one, based on PCRE: http://www.renatomancuso.com/software/pcreworkbench/pcreworkbench.htm
Doesn't anyone remember that it's been less than two weeks since the DOJ Antitrust oversight finished? Is there any wonder about the timing?
Disclaimer: I work with SGI, so I can shed some light on their customer's perspective (NASA, gov't, research labs, etc.) and solution to this problem.
The increasing density of servers is exacerbating the problem of power and cooling in every data center. This week is the SuperComputing trade show where the the new top 500 supercomputers edition was released with "Big Turnover Among the Top 10 Systems," where you can see the first examples to address these issues.
SGI's new ICE blade system was launched a few months ago, it was designed to address the power consumption, real estate density, and cooling issues everyone will probably experience on their next server cycle. ICE has shipped and one installation is now #3 on the Top 500. It's a welcome sign that SGI is back from bankruptcy. I'm sorry if this seems like an advert, so I'm not going to link to SGI -- you can go find out more easily if you want.
You seem to have some facts wrong, so your viewpoints are off.
MicroSoft has not released Silverlight for Linux, go look at the downloads page (/silverlight/downloads.aspx). They probably never will.
Miguel de Icaza of Mono/GNOME/Novell fame has led the effort to make a Linux implementation called MoonLight (http://www.mono-project.com/Moonlight). Supposedly, Microsoft will not sue for the infringement of their intellectual property, http://www.microsoft.com/interop/msnovellcollab/moonlight.mspx -- but that is a promise, not a license, so those are legally tenuous grounds to walk on. If they were serious, then they would grant a license. The problem is that it would have to be an open source license.
Do not delude yourself or others: Microsoft sees Linux as a threat to their OS. Microsoft uses Silverlight to control Internet user interfaces and fend off adoption of Adobe/Macromedia's Flash, Java applets, and the web standard of SVG, and even AJAX/HTML/CSS as well as all other UIs.
JavaScript has always operated in a sandbox: so I disagree about your notion of "developed in a trusting world" because any compromise is lethal, no matter what the point. Designing a sandbox around JavaScript is pragmatic security design -- much like Flash, Java applets, and much unlike ActiveX's origins. So if you've ignored the security patches of JavaScript (to keep it secure) and if you've never benefited from an AJAX web site or HTML form validation, then I can forgive your comment.
Of course, people who do not design for graceful degradation of any technology in a web page might have caused your comments, but the web benefits from dynamic applications in web pages: there's no installation necessary.
You can keep your HTML 1.0 web circa 1993 -- I remember it fondly, because nostalgia wins the truthiness argument. I'm happier with the possibilities of web applications based on open standards delivered by the Internet versus proprietary OS applications because it fosters competition and advancement in the market.
I seem to remember VBScript, it's a perfect example of MicroSoft's agenda and why JavaScript should evolve instead of fork. From a pragmatic point of view, there might have reason -- but it's clear that MicroSoft's agenda is neither technical, nor pragmatic. Image M$ advancing the same argument for forking Java into a new language when new functionality/semantics were planned? It's ridiculous.
I came across this but haven't tried it yet: http://www.bad-behavior.ioerror.us/ and of course, there are other interesting ways to prevent submissions: http://recaptcha.net/learnmore.html
WebCalendar is an open source, database driven, PHP web application that supports iCal and a rich feature set for multi-user calendaring.
http://www.k5n.us/webcalendar.php (home page of the SourceForge project)
Perhaps because a P2P distribution scheme like BitTorrent can be faster than:
- a big file server cluster at a single data center with a big pipe out to the entire internet. No matter how big the pipe and server cluster at the source, you've got network bandwidth constraints on getting to you at your ISP aside from your last mile connection.
This single source solution does not allow for efficient huge file distribution over the entire Internet unless each ISP can cache many huge files: I doubt many do although this also allows the ISP to advance the anti-Network Neutrality issue.
- the above content provider leveraging a content distribution network like Akamai or Kontiki, etc.: at least this helps minimize network congestion by removing hops to you, but they still have to pass through your ISP's network. This situation still can't beat local peers on your ISPs private network sharing data to you.
So while you do not always win the fastest downloads with P2P, there are still many situations where you can win.
Why hog your upstream bandwidth when it's not being used?
ISPs don't seem to constrain upstream as much they have concerns for downstream. Of course there are cases where they do and they meter for usage, but I'm not sure that's an issue with local peers on the network.
Those are my thoughts for answers, hope it helps.
I second the motion, but have you played the AvP series on the PCs? They have most of the same elements.
Without a doubt, the game of the year that I would pick has to be: Shadow of the Colossus, by team ICO, for the PS2.
The story and twist at the ending is haunting, the environment and setting are completely immersive, the gameplay is unique (climbing and conquering the bosses -- each are puzzles), and the soundtrack is epic.
The game won many awards, so I'll quote the Wikipedia article:
However, this game is not for everyone because there's very little immediate gratification: it takes time to explore the forbidden lands on horseback and to find the bosses, the interface is minimal, there are no points, and each battle can last 20-50 minutes.
It's a masterwork, I flash back to moments of gameplay and the ending, and I only wish that there would be more of it because very few games have captured my imagination this way. I hope you enjoy it, it's become a "greatest hit" for under $20 now. Cheers!
http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS10/ first link points to the press release and the CSS Hall of Fame is worth visiting, too!
It was about ten years ago that I saw Hakon present CSS to some of the engineers and product managers at Netscape, where I was a technology evangelist. That was a great moment in my career, where I knew how much trouble we had with the rendering engine as well as how much responsibility we had to fight the good fight for standards.
Thanks to Hakon and Bert, congrats to the w3c, and keep on on styling your designs!
That is not true (see below). Sure gaming is one reason to compare, but I believe you are sticking to a single dimensional analysis rather than seeing the media convergence device Microsoft and Sony are fighting to get into your living room. The article does not mention the Wii because it's audience cares about hi def movies -- not games! For this audience, the Playstation3 gaming platform is a secondary consideration to its BluRay, HDMI 1.3, and 1080p HDTV capabilites.
I'll use the US retail prices from now on... The PS3 ($499 or $599 version) is the cheapest BluRay player, by a margin of hundreds of dollars today. Recent price check on BluRay players: Sony Samsung BDP1000 ($1000), Pioneer's player ($1000+), and I think I've heard of a Philips player as well ($?).
The core XBOX 360 ($299) + HD DVD ($199) add on (which is a 2nd generation Toshiba drive) add to $498, which is roughly equal to the retail price of the base, first generation model Toshiba HD-A1 HD-DVD player ($499). The street price has started to drop on the first generation players, so you are correct in your assessment if price was the only consideration for HD-DVD movie playback.
But I think you can see that Sony and Microsoft are discounting hardware in order to gain market acceptance and market share for a new gaming platform and for a new high definition DVD playback device.
Why would Microsoft release the HD-DVD add on and why would Sony cripple it's lauch to bundle BluRay for their consoles if gaming was the only way to evaluate them? Because there is more to consider.
The next generation consoles are a converged business platform. They represent a war involving video, audio, and game content delivered via online and software media. Each platform drives hardware, software, codec, and network components for sales, licensing, and royalties.
Expect the consoles to clash and potentially partner with iTV, iTunes, cable, satellite, and other media providers. I don't know how soon or how successful they will be, but be prepared for people to evaluate them not on games, but on: "can I get or rent (this movie, my music, my pictures, etc.) on my XBOX 360 or Playstation3?"
Mod parent down -- the poster missed the point of the article.
The article's web site audience is focused on High Definition movies. Both game consoles are trying to expand their scope to be a home media center (for movies, pictures, music, etc.) as well.
In fact, the article agrees with the poster's comment, making it a redundant observation and not +3 Insightful. RTFM, from the fine Article...
I'm less affiliated with the industry now, but I've been to three E3s and they are great experiences. I ultimately had to say no to attending this year due to scheduling conflicts.
However, I wonder if this year two factors will reduce the E3 gross attendance of 35,000 from last year?
Consider if you will:
(See Package 4 at http://www.e3expo.com/attendees/pricing.aspx)
See http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70075-0.ht
I have to discount the latter factor because most people don't know this will happen and probably don't care too much to complain or applaud.
I believe that because you did not address the Register's sensationalism, you agree with my first point.
Does SGI have the ability to come in line with revenue to become a healthy company? That is the question. The focus of your statement was on the current company performance, implying there is no future because of the past. Perhaps you've heard the warning that "past performance is not an indication of future gains."
I extoll the vitures of a company that can turn around. Will they? We'll see. SGI is certainly not the same company we knew and your nostalgia about IRIX isn't relevant because new SGI customers are buying (essentially) Linux on Itanium for high performance computing because they do offer value. Go to the web site and look at the press releases and see if simple math makes SGI returning to health impossible.
Like everything in life, it is a matter of execution and time. Thanks for your response.