No, the "random iraqis" are another 50,000. My point was that our military was very good at killing things. This exists independently of whether or not we should be there (for the record: WORST. IDEA. EVER.)
And how many insurgents have been killed compared to US troops? We kill 30 or 40 insurgents/terrorists for each American soldier who dies. We can see them in the dark, we can see them through walls, the only way they inflict casualties on us are by manually triggered landmines. That's not a large scale warfare strategy, it's a media strategy for inducing war weariness. The insurgents will never defeat us by planting bombs and killing US soldiers 3 or 4 at a time, all they can do is make us want to leave.
Naturally, the use of mercenaries in a US military operation scares the crap out of me.
What, you mean like the 25,000 "Private Security Contractors" in Iraq and Afghanistan right now? If they're not mercenaries, I don't know what to call them.
This is the same reason revolvers are still the best home personal defense weapon. Doesn't jam and it's very simple mechanically.
This kind of technology would be most useful in very destructive weapons, like shoulder mounted rockets, mortars or tank rounds. Handguns and assault rifles have largely been perfected anyway.
Right, the point being that customers are increasingly caring less about what Sun can offer them than price. The business model for servers is quickly becoming the same as the one for printers (industrial laser printers, not the cheap inkjet ones. That's the home PC market.)
Dell and HP are eating Sun for lunch right now at their own game (selling server hardware,) so I do consider it a valid comparison.
I've had issues with Apple gear before, and their customer service has been great. Send your stuff in for RMA and you get it back within a week; most PC manufacturers are not so fast. Sure, they generally won't tell you what's wrong, but they will send you a new one. And Apple's machines aren't as extravagantly priced as people like to say. Compared to any major manufacturer (so exclude those brand-X notebooks from Japan/Korea/China,) Apple stuff is generally about $100-200 more, but comes with tangible features that make it worth that to some people (motion sensors, built in camera, ambient light sensor for the backlit keyboard, etc.) But yeah, they are JAFC and if people knew that going in they wouldn't be so shocked when things break.
Let me say this; Apple has *always* been forthcoming and quick with recalls about defects in their PCs. The iPod is a notable exception; it is a consumer electronics device sold on much lower margin (thus allowing less room for customer service and recalls.) We've all seen the recall formula from Fight Club, and it doesn't just apply in the auto industry.
Oh come on. Your name, address and telephone number are not private information. In fact, rumor has it that there is a book somewhere that has the name, address and number of every person in the entire city. Imagine if someone with nefarious purposes were to get ahold of that -- we would all be in trouble!
Every time a single user finds an isolated manufacturing defect in a product from Apple, a hellstorm is raised. Often, these problems are not widespread or are only borne out of unrealistic expectations (the latter is partly Apple's fault through their marketing.) For example, this battery issue is probably a previously unknown quality control issue at the battery manufacturer Apple uses. No doubt other computer makers use the same batteries in their laptops.
When you make 200,000+ of something, yeah, some of them are going to have parts that may take some time to fail and thus are not caught by quality control. You don't see people doing this to Dell or IBM, they just RMA the damn thing and get another.
Many of these companies that are failing are doing so because the "mid-size business server" market that once ran Netware, or on Sun or SGI hardware has moved to commodity PC hardware with Linux. A mid-size Oracle database in 1995 was runinng on Sun hardware under Solaris, now the reccomended platform is RedHat on an Opteron.
These companies are trying to adapt, but the fact is that their market niche was absorbed by the commodity PC market (pentiums and opterons,) which is low-margin and highly competitive. A lot of them are trying to move into this space and they just can't compete with Dell or HP on price because of their corporate sales model. Sun sends in 2 or 3 experienced technical sales guys to try and sell you something. Dell hires kids fresh out of college who take phone and internet orders.
These dinosaurs are pretty much doomed to extinction in my eyes. Sun does make some good Opteron boxes, but that niche will disappear as well once Dell starts selling 4-way Opterons. IMO Sun needs to get out of the hardware/OS business entirely and focus on their products that are doing well and have a future. Solaris is dead in the water and
Video in Firefox works with CNN, SI and ESPN. Actually I haven't run across a video I *can't* run in Firefox. The only websites I know of that don't support Firefox are Microsoft's own stuff like Outlook Web Access and Windows Update.
All of your points are totally correct. However, none of it means anything when trying to get a job where they care about a degree. What a college diploma seems to mean these days is "I was able to keep my life from falling apart for 4 years, I'm a stable person!" Of course, 7 year graduation rates for college freshmen are around the 50% mark at most schools, so that may be more of an achievement than it sounds.
And we need the American university system, if only for the reason that our public school system doesn't teach people enough. I had never had a history class that said anything bad about America (they were taught from the textbooks purchased by the state government, what do you expect?) I never had a chemistry or physics class that taught more than the most elementary calculations.
Our public school systems are not producing adults who can compete in a global work force, so we need the exact kind of university system we have: a couple really prestigious places, and a whole lot of "teaching colleges." Last I heard, only about 25% of Americans had a 4-year college degree, so it's not quite so ubiquitous to be meaningless. If anything, we need MORE universities that cater to the lowest common denominator: not everyone can go to Yale, but everyone should be able to get an education, even if it is from community college.
The root of all evil is religion itself. People who believe in god are by definition irrational and suggestible.
You got the first part right. Believing in God is fine (we will probably never have scientific evidence one way or another,) but telling other people how to believe in God is both arrogant and destructive to the purpose (we have no evidence one way or another, so how do you know you're right?) It's got to be a personal choice.
And lest we forget, Christianity once held the same extremist and militant views as the super-conservative Muslim sects. See: the Crusades, Spanish Inquisition, colonization of America (north and south,) etc. The Christian bible is not exactly PG itself either; it is at least no less violent than the Qur'an.
Jobs is the enemy because he is removing distribution control from the record labels. They seem to care about this as much as they do about profit. Now he wants to do it to the movie industry. They don't understand that one of the reasons iTMS is so popular is that the pricing scheme is so simple. No needing to worry about what price the thing you want to buy is, just $1 a song. They don't realize that whatever hamstrung service they try to use to sell low quality downloads for the same price as the DVD won't catch on.
Or, I'll put it this way for the MPAA, so they might understand: The alternative for most people is NetFlix and a DVD burner.
Cost of living in the US > cost of living in the 3rd world.
Cost of crops in the US without subsidies = cost of crops in 3rd world
And you need to keep the infrastructure in place. Sure, you can grow food anywhere, but to grow large quantities of food (say, enough to feed a country) you need irrigation, storage and distribution systems already in place. Otherwise they take years to build and your country has starved in the meantime. Nothing will lead people to revolt quite like hunger.
I think games like WoW took a lot of time to make but it paid off to be a really stable engine with great features that blew everyone away.
After playing WoW for a year, there are so many bugs that were identified in beta that still exist in the game it's almost criminal. They have never been able to keep the servers up consistently (and talking to friends, I hear they are still having problems, a year and a half after release,) and every patch introduces new bugs that can take months to get fixed (if it is indeed a bug; many things are "changes in mechanics" which aren't documented either way so people don't know if it's a bug or not.)
So it's not the best example. Blizzard lost a lot of the good will they built up over the years with WoW. I know I'll think twice about buying a Blizzard game after seeing how they treat their customer base like 5 year olds. I'll certainly never buy another online-only Blizzard game.
All the datacenter growth in Texas is happening in central and north Texas, nowhere near Houston. You've gotta remember, Texas is bigger than all of New England, so there are a lot of differences in climate across the state. Central Texas is actually about 5-10 degrees cooler year round than Houston, there's no state income tax, and land is some of the cheapest in the country. Power is good as well; Texas has an independent electric grid from the rest of the US. There is a lot of wind power generated in the northwest part of the state thanks to the constant 15-30 mph winds. Add to that a general lack of natural disasters (thunderstorms and infrequent tornadoes are about it) and it's pretty much the ideal place to locate a datacenter.
Re:probably on Microsoft's list of next important
on
Apache down, IIS up
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Apache is easy to use. There are a billion and one admins who know how to configure it. It's fast, extensible, and runs on Windows to boot. Why the hell would you want to run IIS if you're already running Apache? I have worked extensively in the hosting industry, and let me say that customers on IIS + ASP have many, many more problems than those running on an Apache + PHP/Perl based system.
In a web server environment, Windows costs more than Linux, period. Administration is more complex, downtime is more frequent (Windows requires you to reboot for a large number of security fixes,) site intrusions more destructive and harder to remove, and Windows Server 2003 gets very expensive in a server farm. Web hosting is a bottom dollar business; companies are trying to reduce IT costs, not raise them.
Windows is well suited for many environments. Web hosting is not one of them.
I administer both Linux and Windows servers as well. Windows servers (2003 here, specifically, but the same applies to other versions as well) actually work ok and are probably as stable as Linux as long as you don't change anything meaningful on them. Adding users, changing settings, etc is all ok, but don't you dare install anything on a working Windows server without a full, bootable drive copy or a SAN snapshot. That's where Windows servers lose their reliability in my book.
Blanketly saying "Windows is more/less reliable than Linux!" is flat out wrong (or at the very least, misguided) anyway. What were these machines doing? Were they sitting there just passing packets and not reconfigured once, or are they being constantly tweaked and redeployed? How many people were using them?
Uptime is also usually measured in percentages in the business world. I'm willing to bet the author of this FUD saw "99% uptime for Linux, 99.2% uptime for Windows... That's 20% more!"
To locate and destroy their radar and missile sites so our planes/helicopters can rain death from above when the large invasion force arrives? Your knowledge of military operations seems to stop at Waterloo.
Close air support (helicopters and airplanes like the A-10) is responsible for the large portion of casualties in non-urban conflict these days. Pin them down with infantry and mop em up with a chopper. That's why insurgents in Iraq largely stick to the cities; our superiority in an open field is unquestioned.
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No, the "random iraqis" are another 50,000. My point was that our military was very good at killing things. This exists independently of whether or not we should be there (for the record: WORST. IDEA. EVER.)
It'd probably be an interesting magazine if the editors were eating acid.
I think the tons of font faces were something some aging designer thought approximated leetspeak (it hurts my eyes to read it, its gotta be cool!)
And how many insurgents have been killed compared to US troops? We kill 30 or 40 insurgents/terrorists for each American soldier who dies. We can see them in the dark, we can see them through walls, the only way they inflict casualties on us are by manually triggered landmines. That's not a large scale warfare strategy, it's a media strategy for inducing war weariness. The insurgents will never defeat us by planting bombs and killing US soldiers 3 or 4 at a time, all they can do is make us want to leave.
Naturally, the use of mercenaries in a US military operation scares the crap out of me.
What, you mean like the 25,000 "Private Security Contractors" in Iraq and Afghanistan right now? If they're not mercenaries, I don't know what to call them.
This is the same reason revolvers are still the best home personal defense weapon. Doesn't jam and it's very simple mechanically.
This kind of technology would be most useful in very destructive weapons, like shoulder mounted rockets, mortars or tank rounds. Handguns and assault rifles have largely been perfected anyway.
Right, the point being that customers are increasingly caring less about what Sun can offer them than price. The business model for servers is quickly becoming the same as the one for printers (industrial laser printers, not the cheap inkjet ones. That's the home PC market.)
Dell and HP are eating Sun for lunch right now at their own game (selling server hardware,) so I do consider it a valid comparison.
I've had issues with Apple gear before, and their customer service has been great. Send your stuff in for RMA and you get it back within a week; most PC manufacturers are not so fast. Sure, they generally won't tell you what's wrong, but they will send you a new one. And Apple's machines aren't as extravagantly priced as people like to say. Compared to any major manufacturer (so exclude those brand-X notebooks from Japan/Korea/China,) Apple stuff is generally about $100-200 more, but comes with tangible features that make it worth that to some people (motion sensors, built in camera, ambient light sensor for the backlit keyboard, etc.) But yeah, they are JAFC and if people knew that going in they wouldn't be so shocked when things break.
Let me say this; Apple has *always* been forthcoming and quick with recalls about defects in their PCs. The iPod is a notable exception; it is a consumer electronics device sold on much lower margin (thus allowing less room for customer service and recalls.) We've all seen the recall formula from Fight Club, and it doesn't just apply in the auto industry.
There's always CentOS.
Oh come on. Your name, address and telephone number are not private information. In fact, rumor has it that there is a book somewhere that has the name, address and number of every person in the entire city. Imagine if someone with nefarious purposes were to get ahold of that -- we would all be in trouble!
Every time a single user finds an isolated manufacturing defect in a product from Apple, a hellstorm is raised. Often, these problems are not widespread or are only borne out of unrealistic expectations (the latter is partly Apple's fault through their marketing.) For example, this battery issue is probably a previously unknown quality control issue at the battery manufacturer Apple uses. No doubt other computer makers use the same batteries in their laptops.
When you make 200,000+ of something, yeah, some of them are going to have parts that may take some time to fail and thus are not caught by quality control. You don't see people doing this to Dell or IBM, they just RMA the damn thing and get another.
Many of these companies that are failing are doing so because the "mid-size business server" market that once ran Netware, or on Sun or SGI hardware has moved to commodity PC hardware with Linux. A mid-size Oracle database in 1995 was runinng on Sun hardware under Solaris, now the reccomended platform is RedHat on an Opteron.
These companies are trying to adapt, but the fact is that their market niche was absorbed by the commodity PC market (pentiums and opterons,) which is low-margin and highly competitive. A lot of them are trying to move into this space and they just can't compete with Dell or HP on price because of their corporate sales model. Sun sends in 2 or 3 experienced technical sales guys to try and sell you something. Dell hires kids fresh out of college who take phone and internet orders.
These dinosaurs are pretty much doomed to extinction in my eyes. Sun does make some good Opteron boxes, but that niche will disappear as well once Dell starts selling 4-way Opterons. IMO Sun needs to get out of the hardware/OS business entirely and focus on their products that are doing well and have a future. Solaris is dead in the water and
Germs are good for ya. Seriously, it's not bad to get sick once in a while. It helps you build antibodies for when you catch something *really* nasty.
Laptops also can't scream "Daddy I hate you!" and steal your beloved laptop to pawn for drugs :(
Yeah, OWA works but you get the crappy non-AJAX interface. WU won't work at all though.
Video in Firefox works with CNN, SI and ESPN. Actually I haven't run across a video I *can't* run in Firefox. The only websites I know of that don't support Firefox are Microsoft's own stuff like Outlook Web Access and Windows Update.
All of your points are totally correct. However, none of it means anything when trying to get a job where they care about a degree. What a college diploma seems to mean these days is "I was able to keep my life from falling apart for 4 years, I'm a stable person!" Of course, 7 year graduation rates for college freshmen are around the 50% mark at most schools, so that may be more of an achievement than it sounds.
And we need the American university system, if only for the reason that our public school system doesn't teach people enough. I had never had a history class that said anything bad about America (they were taught from the textbooks purchased by the state government, what do you expect?) I never had a chemistry or physics class that taught more than the most elementary calculations.
Our public school systems are not producing adults who can compete in a global work force, so we need the exact kind of university system we have: a couple really prestigious places, and a whole lot of "teaching colleges." Last I heard, only about 25% of Americans had a 4-year college degree, so it's not quite so ubiquitous to be meaningless. If anything, we need MORE universities that cater to the lowest common denominator: not everyone can go to Yale, but everyone should be able to get an education, even if it is from community college.
The root of all evil is religion itself. People who believe in god are by definition irrational and suggestible.
You got the first part right. Believing in God is fine (we will probably never have scientific evidence one way or another,) but telling other people how to believe in God is both arrogant and destructive to the purpose (we have no evidence one way or another, so how do you know you're right?) It's got to be a personal choice.
And lest we forget, Christianity once held the same extremist and militant views as the super-conservative Muslim sects. See: the Crusades, Spanish Inquisition, colonization of America (north and south,) etc. The Christian bible is not exactly PG itself either; it is at least no less violent than the Qur'an.
Jobs is the enemy because he is removing distribution control from the record labels. They seem to care about this as much as they do about profit. Now he wants to do it to the movie industry. They don't understand that one of the reasons iTMS is so popular is that the pricing scheme is so simple. No needing to worry about what price the thing you want to buy is, just $1 a song. They don't realize that whatever hamstrung service they try to use to sell low quality downloads for the same price as the DVD won't catch on.
Or, I'll put it this way for the MPAA, so they might understand: The alternative for most people is NetFlix and a DVD burner.
Cost of living in the US > cost of living in the 3rd world.
Cost of crops in the US without subsidies = cost of crops in 3rd world
And you need to keep the infrastructure in place. Sure, you can grow food anywhere, but to grow large quantities of food (say, enough to feed a country) you need irrigation, storage and distribution systems already in place. Otherwise they take years to build and your country has starved in the meantime. Nothing will lead people to revolt quite like hunger.
I think games like WoW took a lot of time to make but it paid off to be a really stable engine with great features that blew everyone away.
After playing WoW for a year, there are so many bugs that were identified in beta that still exist in the game it's almost criminal. They have never been able to keep the servers up consistently (and talking to friends, I hear they are still having problems, a year and a half after release,) and every patch introduces new bugs that can take months to get fixed (if it is indeed a bug; many things are "changes in mechanics" which aren't documented either way so people don't know if it's a bug or not.)
So it's not the best example. Blizzard lost a lot of the good will they built up over the years with WoW. I know I'll think twice about buying a Blizzard game after seeing how they treat their customer base like 5 year olds. I'll certainly never buy another online-only Blizzard game.
All the datacenter growth in Texas is happening in central and north Texas, nowhere near Houston. You've gotta remember, Texas is bigger than all of New England, so there are a lot of differences in climate across the state. Central Texas is actually about 5-10 degrees cooler year round than Houston, there's no state income tax, and land is some of the cheapest in the country. Power is good as well; Texas has an independent electric grid from the rest of the US. There is a lot of wind power generated in the northwest part of the state thanks to the constant 15-30 mph winds. Add to that a general lack of natural disasters (thunderstorms and infrequent tornadoes are about it) and it's pretty much the ideal place to locate a datacenter.
Apache is easy to use. There are a billion and one admins who know how to configure it. It's fast, extensible, and runs on Windows to boot. Why the hell would you want to run IIS if you're already running Apache? I have worked extensively in the hosting industry, and let me say that customers on IIS + ASP have many, many more problems than those running on an Apache + PHP/Perl based system.
In a web server environment, Windows costs more than Linux, period. Administration is more complex, downtime is more frequent (Windows requires you to reboot for a large number of security fixes,) site intrusions more destructive and harder to remove, and Windows Server 2003 gets very expensive in a server farm. Web hosting is a bottom dollar business; companies are trying to reduce IT costs, not raise them.
Windows is well suited for many environments. Web hosting is not one of them.
I administer both Linux and Windows servers as well. Windows servers (2003 here, specifically, but the same applies to other versions as well) actually work ok and are probably as stable as Linux as long as you don't change anything meaningful on them. Adding users, changing settings, etc is all ok, but don't you dare install anything on a working Windows server without a full, bootable drive copy or a SAN snapshot. That's where Windows servers lose their reliability in my book.
Blanketly saying "Windows is more/less reliable than Linux!" is flat out wrong (or at the very least, misguided) anyway. What were these machines doing? Were they sitting there just passing packets and not reconfigured once, or are they being constantly tweaked and redeployed? How many people were using them?
Uptime is also usually measured in percentages in the business world. I'm willing to bet the author of this FUD saw "99% uptime for Linux, 99.2% uptime for Windows... That's 20% more!"
To locate and destroy their radar and missile sites so our planes/helicopters can rain death from above when the large invasion force arrives? Your knowledge of military operations seems to stop at Waterloo.
Close air support (helicopters and airplanes like the A-10) is responsible for the large portion of casualties in non-urban conflict these days. Pin them down with infantry and mop em up with a chopper. That's why insurgents in Iraq largely stick to the cities; our superiority in an open field is unquestioned.
Nah, it's more how we sneak troops into a country we haven't invaded yet. Like Iran.