I hope to see Michael Geist on the list of great Canadians someday. I would put him ahead of a number of Prime Ministers / Premiers of the last 25 years.
There''s a hell of a lot more to programming than just Web programming and there are a lot of real programming languages that go to great lengths to make secure programming easier.
You're totally right about ESX/ESXi and whiteboxes but have you considered Citrix's XenServer? If you have experience installing ESX, then XenServer is quite straightforward and it doesn't snub commodity hardware like ESX does.
Citrix has been offering free downloads of XenServer for a while but a limited trial of their extras as well.
Better Place, the initiative started by former SAP exec Shai Agassi, is leaning towards leasing the batteries and have a recently launched taxi service in Tokyo that have quick-swap facilities. But, convenient as battery swapping would be, it will be a nightmare without standardization.
Funny! But, you're wrong. At least in the short term,which may be a lot longer than I'd like, the #1 response will be that it can't be done. Meanwhile, people like Shai Agassi will be busy doing it.
Math, incredibly useful as it is, is no substitute for imagination. There are lots of ways to deal with the need for charging stations and I'm cheered to see that there are at least some places in the world that are moving on this, unlike the pathetic efforts of my own country.
As demand rises, I foresee parking lots, whether at work, shopping centers, wherever, installing quick-charge stations. And those gas stations will likely do it as well. I wonder if any of the auto manufacturers have electric car designs where the battery is quick-swappable? If so, you could have garage stations where you can pull in and swap your depleted battery for a charged one but that'll have lots more headaches than charging stations because of issues such as battery standardization, warranty, disposal, etc. Initially, those kinds of stations would likely be manufacturer specific but then we could have the auto dealers performing that function.
Yes, there'll be headaches, and lots of them but I don't see it being anywhere near as difficult as starting from practically nothing, including expertise, and having to build the highway, railways and electricity infrastructure as our forebears were faced with doing, 150 years or so ago.
Poorly executed, perhaps but it was a good idea. And it has broad support from the cops and emergency physicians. But, they were too namby-pamby about it and a lot of the cost was from folks who were very much against it getting in the way. If they'd had real balls, they could have gotten it done more quickly and cheaply but since the money was spent and the registry built, it would be a huge waste to dismantle it now.
As a long time Opera user ( version 2, if memory serves ), I can tell you that they have long been the speed king as well as the most conformant to Web standards. Apple raised the speed bar with Safari 3 although I found that gunmetal interface hard on the eyes and Google really boosted the perception of what Javascript is capable of. But, with the release of the Carakan JS engine, Opera is right up there with them. We'll see if IE9's hardware accel raises the bar again and if the browsers-that-be can step up. Truth to tell, I find the current browser wars to be much more exciting than the long-running Win-Mac-Linux fracas.
Opera has also been truly innovative - the widgets are cool although I find Firefox ( and now Chrome ) extensions to be more useful day-to-day, which is why Opera isn't my primary browser; they included a servicable torrent client years ago but nothing can touch uTorrent on Wintel, it seems and their multipage print feature, over ten years old, has yet to be matched by any of the mainstream browsers I've used. And lets not forget Opera Mail and the new Unite embedded web server. I've also found Opera to be the most scalable of the current crop of browsers - I'm working on benchmarking several to see where they start crapping out and what quirks show up when under extreme load. A scalable browser gets high marks from me as I tend to be a voracious serial browser - I frequently run up Firefox sessions of 5+ windows and 100+ tabs.
Have you met many men from Saudi Arabia? If they're not attending Most Beautiful Goat contests, they're blowing up buildings. Probably not as happy a bunch as you think
I place a lot of the blame on M$ not making it simple to run (simultaneously) multiple versions of IE on the same machine. That at least would allow IT admins / developers time to deal with the problem by tying the oh-so precious webapp to a specific IE version.
Wind!! Considering all the gassy North Americans I've met ( me included ) we could export power to Mars. If we could figure out a way to harness farts, it would be a multiple source - wind power, methane, hydrogen.
Are you kidding? Can you imagine the bidding war among the super-rich of the Islamic world to own the heart of the infidels? And the effort of the Christian ( not just Catholic ) faithful to keep it out of their hands? And probably China would swoop in and outbid everyone at the last moment. The sale of the Vatican would be the auction and story of the millennium.
There's plenty of violence in modern countries, a great deal of it practiced by those who are products of those centuries of modernisation. I think that a greater problem with the violence of Muslims is that, from a religious perspective, they don't have a living central authority. Like him or not, agree with him or not, we have the Pope to say what is and isn't Catholic. The Anglicans have the Archbishop of Cantebury, the Eastern Orthodox has the Patriarch, etc.
But the only central authority for Muslims is the long-dead Prophet. Everything else is left to the imams, who seem to love violence and fiery rhetoric. Also, the translations of parts of the Koran I've read glorify or condone violence to an extreme I've not seen in any other religion.
With only 1 exception, all the things I've bought with rebates were things I really wanted or would have bought anyway. And I guess, I'be become efficient at processing them but I still hate it. I loathe doing it but cash have been tight for a long time and I don't want my systems, and experience to fall too far behind the curve. But I dream of the day I'm well off enough to be able to tell companies that I would have bought their product if it wasn't for that damned mail-in rebate.
I'm with you on this. Friggin' rebates must have been invented by the Devil. I lambasted one of my favorite retailers for carry a $25 dollar rebate on a $700 drive. At present, my rebate threshold is $25 or 10% whichever is GREATER.
Yeah, right. It's my non-techie friends who are most impressed by SSDs, mostly because it comes close to the instant-on that they get from their other electronic devices ( the Blackberry being a notable exception ). Also, the resistance to shock ( more important in mobiles, true ) is also a wow-factor - most of my friends have kids and accidents happen.
Your customers are raving about that build of yours because they've been stuck with Windows XP for years and, if they've not upgraded their machine recently, they probably have a 512 or 1GB box with a dying disk.
You can argue that something may not be needed, and you might be right for a large number of people if you build it and make it affordable, they will come and find a use for it. I've heard the "that ain't needed" argument about every piece of tech since 1970 and someone probably said the same thing about fire and the wheel.
Here's how I see it - faster random access leads to better multitasking which leads to greater productivity. Also, the best way to speed up a system is to significantly enhance the slowest of the heavily used components / interfaces. The SSD represent the most significant narrowing of the gap between CPU / Memory / Storage performance in 2 decades. I say it's way overdue and the pricing on end-user drives can't get to $1/GB fast enough to please me.
And, RAID 0? Sounds good in principle but I wouldn't trust this anymore on my boot drive. After several months of flawless performance on Nvidia FakeRAID, the boot partition up and disappeared without any warnings. It worked one morning and didn't that evening. And before you start telling me about getting a real RAID controller, all the ones that have been recommended have been so expensive, I'd be better off spending it on an SSD.
Considering how much variety and mindshare there's been around SSDs and the competition with HDDs, I find that the prices have stayed much too high for far too long. I wonder if we are going to hear about another PC/IT price-fixing scheme.
Not in my opinion. If I were an employer, I'd be less concerned over employees going to Penthouse or Playboy than to this site. No, the images aren't at all explicit but these lifelike dolls are disturbing.
Let me save you some time, trouble and hair - your problems are too difficult to solve numerically. Go find something else to do unless you plan to live for a very, very long time.
I saw an episode of Real Time with Bill Maher where he pointed out how stupid his fellow Americans look, as he put it, waving the yellow foam "We're number 1" finger when the US is not in the top 20 worldwide in many important categories.
Slashdot Mirror
I hope to see Michael Geist on the list of great Canadians someday. I would put him ahead of a number of Prime Ministers / Premiers of the last 25 years.
and, therefore, can't afford anything better than the graphics equivalent of Mac'n'Cheese now
that Mom and Dad are no longer paying the bills.
There''s a hell of a lot more to programming than just Web programming and there are a lot of real programming languages that go to great lengths
to make secure programming easier.
The Security Ninja is a paper tiger.
You're totally right about ESX/ESXi and whiteboxes but have you considered Citrix's XenServer? If you have experience installing ESX, then XenServer is quite straightforward and it doesn't snub commodity hardware like ESX does.
Citrix has been offering free downloads of XenServer for a while but a limited trial of their extras as well.
Better Place, the initiative started by former SAP exec Shai Agassi, is leaning towards leasing the batteries and have a recently launched taxi service in Tokyo that have quick-swap facilities.
But, convenient as battery swapping would be, it will be a nightmare without standardization.
http://blog.betterplace.com/2010/04/better-place-launches-switchable-battery-electric-taxis-in-tokyo-today/
Here's something from an imaginary place called Tokyo.
http://blog.betterplace.com/2010/04/better-place-launches-switchable-battery-electric-taxis-in-tokyo-today/
Funny! But, you're wrong. At least in the short term,which may be a lot longer than I'd like, the #1 response will be that it can't be done.
Meanwhile, people like Shai Agassi will be busy doing it.
Math, incredibly useful as it is, is no substitute for imagination. There are lots of ways to deal with the need for charging stations and I'm cheered to see that there are at least some places in the world that are moving on this, unlike the pathetic efforts of my own country.
As demand rises, I foresee parking lots, whether at work, shopping centers, wherever, installing quick-charge stations. And those gas stations will likely do it as well. I wonder if any of the auto manufacturers have electric car designs where the battery is quick-swappable?
If so, you could have garage stations where you can pull in and swap your depleted battery for a charged one but that'll have lots more headaches than charging stations because of issues such as battery standardization, warranty, disposal, etc.
Initially, those kinds of stations would likely be manufacturer specific but then we could have the auto dealers performing that function.
Yes, there'll be headaches, and lots of them but I don't see it being anywhere near as difficult as starting from practically nothing, including expertise,
and having to build the highway, railways and electricity infrastructure as our forebears were faced with doing, 150 years or so ago.
The lighting benefits both parties - easier for them to count the cash, and you to count their teeth.
Poorly executed, perhaps but it was a good idea. And it has broad support from the cops and emergency physicians.
But, they were too namby-pamby about it and a lot of the cost was from folks who were very much against it getting
in the way.
If they'd had real balls, they could have gotten it done more quickly and cheaply but since the money was spent
and the registry built, it would be a huge waste to dismantle it now.
As a long time Opera user ( version 2, if memory serves ), I can tell you that they have long been the speed king as well as the most conformant to Web standards. Apple raised the speed bar with Safari 3 although I found that gunmetal interface hard on the eyes and Google really boosted the perception of what Javascript is capable of.
But, with the release of the Carakan JS engine, Opera is right up there with them. We'll see if IE9's hardware accel raises the bar again and if the browsers-that-be can step up.
Truth to tell, I find the current browser wars to be much more exciting than the long-running Win-Mac-Linux fracas.
Opera has also been truly innovative - the widgets are cool although I find Firefox ( and now Chrome ) extensions to be more useful day-to-day, which is why Opera isn't my primary browser; they included a servicable torrent client years ago but nothing can touch uTorrent on Wintel, it seems and their multipage print feature, over ten years old, has yet to be matched by any of the mainstream browsers I've used.
And lets not forget Opera Mail and the new Unite embedded web server.
I've also found Opera to be the most scalable of the current crop of browsers - I'm working on benchmarking several to see where they start crapping out and what quirks show up when under extreme load.
A scalable browser gets high marks from me as I tend to be a voracious serial browser - I frequently run up Firefox sessions of 5+ windows and 100+ tabs.
Have you met many men from Saudi Arabia? If they're not attending Most Beautiful Goat contests, they're blowing up buildings.
Probably not as happy a bunch as you think
Definition of the Day:
Bluechip multinational n. - freaking dinosaur
I place a lot of the blame on M$ not making it simple to run (simultaneously) multiple versions of IE on the same machine. That at least
would allow IT admins / developers time to deal with the problem by tying the oh-so precious webapp to a specific IE version.
Congrats, you've been MicrosShafted.
Wind!! Considering all the gassy North Americans I've met ( me included ) we could export power to Mars. If we could figure out a way to harness farts, it would be a multiple source - wind power, methane, hydrogen.
Are you kidding? Can you imagine the bidding war among the super-rich of the Islamic world to own the heart of the infidels?
And the effort of the Christian ( not just Catholic ) faithful to keep it out of their hands?
And probably China would swoop in and outbid everyone at the last moment.
The sale of the Vatican would be the auction and story of the millennium.
Sell the Vatican; donate the proceeds to the poor ( and victimized )
I was thinking about flooding some Dutch Dykes when someone corrected the spelling in the article's title.
DANG!!
There's plenty of violence in modern countries, a great deal of it practiced by those who are products of those centuries of modernisation. I think that a greater problem with the violence of Muslims is that, from a religious perspective, they don't have a living central authority.
Like him or not, agree with him or not, we have the Pope to say what is and isn't Catholic. The Anglicans have the Archbishop of Cantebury, the Eastern Orthodox has the Patriarch, etc.
But the only central authority for Muslims is the long-dead Prophet. Everything else is left to the imams, who seem to love violence and fiery rhetoric.
Also, the translations of parts of the Koran I've read glorify or condone violence to an extreme I've not seen in any other religion.
With only 1 exception, all the things I've bought with rebates were things I really wanted or would have bought anyway.
And I guess, I'be become efficient at processing them but I still hate it. I loathe doing it but cash have been tight for a long time and I don't want my systems, and experience to fall too far behind the curve.
But I dream of the day I'm well off enough to be able to tell companies that I would have bought their product if it wasn't for that damned mail-in rebate.
I'm with you on this. Friggin' rebates must have been invented by the Devil. I lambasted one of my favorite retailers for carry a $25 dollar rebate on a $700 drive. At present, my rebate threshold is $25 or 10% whichever is GREATER.
Yeah, right. It's my non-techie friends who are most impressed by SSDs, mostly because it comes close to the instant-on
that they get from their other electronic devices ( the Blackberry being a notable exception ).
Also, the resistance to shock ( more important in mobiles, true ) is also a wow-factor - most of my friends have kids
and accidents happen.
Your customers are raving about that build of yours because they've been stuck with Windows XP for years and, if they've
not upgraded their machine recently, they probably have a 512 or 1GB box with a dying disk.
You can argue that something may not be needed, and you might be right for a large number of people if you build it
and make it affordable, they will come and find a use for it.
I've heard the "that ain't needed" argument about every piece of tech since 1970 and someone probably said the same thing
about fire and the wheel.
Here's how I see it - faster random access leads to better multitasking which leads to greater productivity.
Also, the best way to speed up a system is to significantly enhance the slowest of the heavily used components / interfaces.
The SSD represent the most significant narrowing of the gap between CPU / Memory / Storage performance in 2 decades.
I say it's way overdue and the pricing on end-user drives can't get to $1/GB fast enough to please me.
And, RAID 0? Sounds good in principle but I wouldn't trust this anymore on my boot drive. After several months of flawless performance on Nvidia FakeRAID, the boot partition up and disappeared without any warnings.
It worked one morning and didn't that evening.
And before you start telling me about getting a real RAID controller, all the ones that have been recommended have been so expensive, I'd be better off spending it on an SSD.
Considering how much variety and mindshare there's been around SSDs and the competition with HDDs, I find that the prices have
stayed much too high for far too long.
I wonder if we are going to hear about another PC/IT price-fixing scheme.
Not in my opinion. If I were an employer, I'd be less concerned over employees going to Penthouse or Playboy
than to this site.
No, the images aren't at all explicit but these lifelike dolls are disturbing.
Let me save you some time, trouble and hair - your problems are too difficult to solve numerically. Go find something else to do
unless you plan to live for a very, very long time.
I saw an episode of Real Time with Bill Maher where he pointed out how stupid his fellow Americans look,
as he put it, waving the yellow foam "We're number 1" finger when the US is not in the top 20 worldwide
in many important categories.
See here - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEtjhh_bG1c
This was from his show on Oct 27th, 2006.
Saying you're number 1 doesn't make it so; and you have to work to stay on top.