Yes, this seems to be functionality that would be implemented in the IOS and not at a hardware level, therefore it wouldn't be very costly (although it could mean a fair amount of man-hours for your Network Admins to implement).
Thank you for taking the time to beat down those that post without knowing WTF they're talking about... I'm glad someone else has the energy to do it (still)!
Actually Nortel is in a dead heat with Cisco to see who can spend the most outrageous sums of money for any kind of optical-networking startups. By-the-by there is also a good deal of research being done on all-optical chips, here's a li nk to some work being done at the University of Toronto. It would be incredible if this 'perfect mirror' could accelerate the likelihood of this coming to my desktop! PS the link showing as li nk is not my fault! I previewed and tried to correct it four times but Slashbug is at max power and is determined to make me look like a knob!
Another option that just came to my mind is to provide the 'base' product as Open Source and have companies or persons who find the product useful pay for added features, similar to Blender (or is it Gimp?) Leave the optional 'plug-in' modules as menu options (I'm making an assumption this is a GUI-based product) that are greyed out unless you buy the specific upgrade modules, which you would have to have ready when releasing the base product. The 'upgrade modules' could be open source or not as you see fit. Plus you can make money from the treeware, which many large companies still like to have around 'just in case'. Best of luck regardless of how you proceed!
An interesting note for an alternate media format (newspapers) that is just now occurring from whence I write (Toronto). We have two local daily newspapers, and they have found that by GIVING AWAY free copies of a smaller, less detailed newspaper they can actually drive up sales of the regular editions. And each of the newspapers undertook to produce these 'minimalist newspapers' within a day of each other (talk about spies in your camp). But this just fits a very well-known pattern in Economics that even I remember. I took only one course in Econ and would have failed it miserably but for 'Bell grading', but I do remember that this is one of the well-documented 'rules of human behaviour' that economists rely upon.
Um, I can't speak to how to cure the problems in Africa. I don't know enough about all of the problems. Part of it is pure human greed, both on the part of the multinationals and the select few that become part of the ruling elite in those countries. Beyond that - [shrug]
But the kid in the 'ghetto' certainly can get a lot from the computers at his school if he has the motivation. Social factors have a greater influence on whether s/he succeeds - if her/his parents value education and honestly want a better life for their kids than they have, the kid stands a good chance. I remember being a geek in the suburbs wasn't easy when I was a kid, I'm sure it's even harder in more depressed areas - there's more pressure to conform to the herd and be a part of something larger than yourself that you can find protection in.
Of course reducing the cost of higher education is definitely a necessity. It'd be nice to see some dot-com 20 year old millionaire contribute to scholarships big time (and Larry Ellison, Steve Ballmer et al.) That would be the other big hurdle, especially in the U.S. and increaingly also here in Canada, IMO.
I agree with what a few posters have said here already... sometimes it is difficult to see what the implications of your technological advances are. lamz brings up some very good points in his post, and these things are the very trivial minutiae of our everyday lives, other than the bank anecdote. We don't have to get up to change channels, whoopee doo we think. But the declining cost of technology means that there are also actually more than 5 channels on television like there would have been in say the mid-60's covering everything from a golf-only channel to up-to-the-minute stock reports.
Also, he is overlooking the advances in many fields of human endeavor that have benefited from the reduced cost and improved performance of technology. The medical and engineering professions come to mind especially. Ask the small business owner who used to have to hire a full-time accountant to keep their accounts and payroll straight if it has made a difference to them. Now they can pay someone to come in for 4 hrs a week (my wife does this for several companies) and get everything printed out in color with charts and graphs to compare month to month stats versus a big book with columns of handwritten figures from the 1890's to early 1980's.
Without tech advances we would never have cheap and fairly reliable airline travel and reservations, the Human Genome Project that promises so many advances in medicine etc. But the invention of the car didn't make much of an impact to most people when it first came out either. Not until Ford started the assembly line and cars became affordable for the average family who could now take a trip from Duluth to the Cali coast in relative style and comfort.
One of the things holding us back is the insecurity of the digital age, identity theft and credit card abuses. I remember a poll that came out recently here in Canada (sorry I can't provide a link) that says the biggest thing holding back Canadians from purchasing online is the lack of security. When & if this changes I'll sure as hell buy a Palm and I'll keep a grocery list on it and add stuff to it throughout the week as it comes to me. One day a week I'll transfer my purchase request to the grocer and have it delivered. And when the Palm is old hat I'll talk into a wristwatch sized thingy on my arm that allows me to do that and more.
Now where technology hasn't been as useful is getting us out of the political/economic consumer ratrace we're caught up in. I think that this revolution is coming, as the rise of ubiquitous instant global communications comes about. All real revolutions in the world have come about as a result of people getting together and communicating new ideas of how to organize and rule themselves, for better or worse. The Bolshevik revolution and the literary circles that Ezra Pound and Ernest Hemingway were part of come to mind as good examples here.
Things were bleakest in France before the French revolution too, so maybe it's just a matter of time before we can really identify "SOMETHING BIG" about to happen as a result of technological changes. Things need time to ferment, and quite possibly things will have to get worse before we learn to use our advances in technology to liberate ourselves rather than enslave ourselves. I mean, when in history have geeks around the world been able to gather and shoot the shit like here on/.? Maybe OSS, the FSF and/. are a rivulet of a stream that is building and we don't even know it. It's a nice thought IMHO. Sorry for the long post, it's just something I've been doin some reflecting on recently.
Stupid? You bet. Happilly Americans get to sit on the smiling side of this double standard, but don't expect that to last forever. Yeah but as long as the U.S. has the nukes and the military muscle, the rest of the world WILL put up with it (unless you really foresee a day when Americans will vote in a public representatives who would allow extradition of a business leader to another country to answer to contravening such a questionable law). I'm upset about what happened with iCrave especially (I am Canadian - [used without permission of Molsons]) but what can we do? Very few countries on this planet have any kind of ability to stand up to the U.S. on issues such as this, except as a concerted group, which this situation certainly doesn't warrant. I also agree with many of the other posters here who feel that France is desperately trying to hang on to a view of the world that just doesn't exist anymore (much like the Canadian province of Quebec). It's kinda quaint too though, but I'm concerned as to what might happen if the majority of the French don't wake up and smell the cafe (notice I have qualified the preceding statement -- I'm sure that some of the French citizenry do 'grok' the shape of things to come) soon.
Actually (to respond to my own post - does that lower your karma or get you some bad slash mojo of some sort?) the article on CNET is better, they indicate that the AVERAGE consumption is less than X watts of power. My question is: why does the 600Mhz PIII consume less than one watt (on average) yet the Celeron 500Mhz consumes less than two watts? Is this part of Intel's plans to push consumers towards buying the more expensive PIII (or am I just being paranoid at the end of a long night shift?)?
I was wondering the same thing, I'm betting that the lower consumption is at lower clock speeds, this being an Intel press release. They're not the worst company for vague press releases, but they sure ain't the best either. I'm no Electrical Engineer but from what I understand TransMeta's solution seems to have an edge. Anybody know if it's possible to combine both methods of reducing power consumption? Still as someone else noted, with decent competition it's the consumer that ends up with a better product in the end.
Maybe all the/. regulars could get a collection going and send the upper management at MS to such a resort if/when it becomes a reality. Since Redmond is the dark side of the earth they might not notice!
You'd be cooped up with some Russian cosmonauts that might not have showered for several days (or weeks? - sorry I'm not intimately familiar with the bathing facilities on Mir) and there ain't that much room in that space station either. But what the hell, if I had a hundred million or so I'd probably pony up the $$ and go too. Any possibility that this is Bill Gates going up? I guess not, he'd just start a MS space program with mission control running on Win2000.
Please reread my post (and others who mention other sources of friction between IBM and Sun). I didn't suggest that Sun as a corporation has acted or will act in the fashion that Microsoft has, only that Scott M. would like to be the 'top gun' in the IT world, a position (arguably) currently occupied by B. Gates. And I AM implying that I believe that Scott M. would love to have the ability to dominate and bully the rest of the computing sector the way that MS' upper management has. Nor did you touch on my contention that IBM has issues with Sun's approach to licencing re: J2EE. Finally, either Scott McNealy has the whitest teeth of any human alive or the person responsible for retouching his photo on the SUN website was a little over zealous!
Excellent comment... if you can't live with the abysmal performance of RAID-5 config'd volumes, go with RAID-10! As you said disks are cheap (OK, the SSA DASD that we use is definitely NOT cheap) and AIX LVM supports RAID-10 config'ed vols. I'm the dude actually doing the copying to the new RAID-10 configured spindles at our shop. Provides the Cadillac of data redundancy and speed (especially the SSA connexions). Good ole IBM, gotta love 'em. LOL re: your comment on an LVM root volume!
One of the things I heard about porting Linux to the S/390 platform was that the development team had to deal with the 16 interrupts available on the PC vs. 65536 (16^4) on S/390. Hmm... I'd love to be able to run OS/2 on our S/390's in single user mode, even tho it would be like driving a Ferrari on a go-kart track!
If I remember correctly Sun also sells the J2EE as a complete package and refuses to sell only the individual component(s) a customer might require. I'm not sure, but I believe that IBM was not really impressed with this fact either, as it would require vastly more expensive J2EE licences for customers that they would be developing solutions for. IMHO Scott McNealy (sp?) is just a Bill Gates waiting to be given full control of the sandbox. Which is a shame, because they're another end-to-end technology company that develops both excellent hardware and software.
I've no exposure with other LVM type products mentioned here but I have used AIX's and it's a thing o' beauty. Even if it's redundant technology, I think Linux benefits from having it available. Our shop is Big Blue all the way (we're currently running Linux on S/390 as a test and have 5 RS/6000 frames as well as an S80 and a HACMP S70) and the only thing that ever causes us a problem is the damned automount process on AIX. Course the OS/390 environment never has a problem...
Was that a shot at Corel? I use WordPerfect (for Linux and Win9x) and like it as an application on both platforms. I actually believe that WordPerfect is superior to MS-Word. I don't use any of the other Corel Office suite products, but if they're even nearly as good they'd be fine in my books. I'm hoping that Corel gets all of their apps ported to Linux (they've got Bryce from MetaCreations now as well) before they go belly up. I'd also consider buying the full version of Corel Linux with all the apps if the price was decent. All this despite the fact that I think Michael Cowpland is a flake.
I'm wondering how long the British govt would tolerate this if they found it to be too offensive. I mean, they sent warships halfway around the world to defend their claim to the Falklands. Also, I wonder about rogue governments such as Iraq that might be very interested in such a territory (can't at the moment think of any use they might have for it, but quite possibly there is one). Best of luck in this endeavor though, it's worthwhile and very interesting, IMHO.
I have a Beeawoolf cluster of such video cards directly wired to my brain, the problem is that there are no drivers for them in Linux and tweaking them to do perfect 3-d modelling in unison has fried my visual cortex. Don't try this at home kids! Professional websurfer on a closed course!
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, this seems to be functionality that would be implemented in the IOS and not at a hardware level, therefore it wouldn't be very costly (although it could mean a fair amount of man-hours for your Network Admins to implement).
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Good point - I believe that this is what RFC2827 partially attempts to address.
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Thank you for taking the time to beat down those that post without knowing WTF they're talking about... I'm glad someone else has the energy to do it (still)!
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Actually Nortel is in a dead heat with Cisco to see who can spend the most outrageous sums of money for any kind of optical-networking startups. By-the-by there is also a good deal of research being done on all-optical chips, here's a li nk to some work being done at the University of Toronto. It would be incredible if this 'perfect mirror' could accelerate the likelihood of this coming to my desktop! PS the link showing as li nk is not my fault! I previewed and tried to correct it four times but Slashbug is at max power and is determined to make me look like a knob!
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Windows users would find that excessive BSOD occurrences would diminish the practical lifetime of 'monitors' made using this technology by half %^)
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Another option that just came to my mind is to provide the 'base' product as Open Source and have companies or persons who find the product useful pay for added features, similar to Blender (or is it Gimp?) Leave the optional 'plug-in' modules as menu options (I'm making an assumption this is a GUI-based product) that are greyed out unless you buy the specific upgrade modules, which you would have to have ready when releasing the base product. The 'upgrade modules' could be open source or not as you see fit. Plus you can make money from the treeware, which many large companies still like to have around 'just in case'.
Best of luck regardless of how you proceed!
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An interesting note for an alternate media format (newspapers) that is just now occurring from whence I write (Toronto). We have two local daily newspapers, and they have found that by GIVING AWAY free copies of a smaller, less detailed newspaper they can actually drive up sales of the regular editions. And each of the newspapers undertook to produce these 'minimalist newspapers' within a day of each other (talk about spies in your camp). But this just fits a very well-known pattern in Economics that even I remember. I took only one course in Econ and would have failed it miserably but for 'Bell grading', but I do remember that this is one of the well-documented 'rules of human behaviour' that economists rely upon.
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Um, I can't speak to how to cure the problems in Africa. I don't know enough about all of the problems. Part of it is pure human greed, both on the part of the multinationals and the select few that become part of the ruling elite in those countries. Beyond that - [shrug]
But the kid in the 'ghetto' certainly can get a lot from the computers at his school if he has the motivation. Social factors have a greater influence on whether s/he succeeds - if her/his parents value education and honestly want a better life for their kids than they have, the kid stands a good chance. I remember being a geek in the suburbs wasn't easy when I was a kid, I'm sure it's even harder in more depressed areas - there's more pressure to conform to the herd and be a part of something larger than yourself that you can find protection in.
Of course reducing the cost of higher education is definitely a necessity. It'd be nice to see some dot-com 20 year old millionaire contribute to scholarships big time (and Larry Ellison, Steve Ballmer et al.) That would be the other big hurdle, especially in the U.S. and increaingly also here in Canada, IMO.
I agree with what a few posters have said here already... sometimes it is difficult to see what the implications of your technological advances are. lamz brings up some very good points in his post, and these things are the very trivial minutiae of our everyday lives, other than the bank anecdote. We don't have to get up to change channels, whoopee doo we think. But the declining cost of technology means that there are also actually more than 5 channels on television like there would have been in say the mid-60's covering everything from a golf-only channel to up-to-the-minute stock reports.
Also, he is overlooking the advances in many fields of human endeavor that have benefited from the reduced cost and improved performance of technology. The medical and engineering professions come to mind especially. Ask the small business owner who used to have to hire a full-time accountant to keep their accounts and payroll straight if it has made a difference to them. Now they can pay someone to come in for 4 hrs a week (my wife does this for several companies) and get everything printed out in color with charts and graphs to compare month to month stats versus a big book with columns of handwritten figures from the 1890's to early 1980's.
Without tech advances we would never have cheap and fairly reliable airline travel and reservations, the Human Genome Project that promises so many advances in medicine etc. But the invention of the car didn't make much of an impact to most people when it first came out either. Not until Ford started the assembly line and cars became affordable for the average family who could now take a trip from Duluth to the Cali coast in relative style and comfort.
One of the things holding us back is the insecurity of the digital age, identity theft and credit card abuses. I remember a poll that came out recently here in Canada (sorry I can't provide a link) that says the biggest thing holding back Canadians from purchasing online is the lack of security. When & if this changes I'll sure as hell buy a Palm and I'll keep a grocery list on it and add stuff to it throughout the week as it comes to me. One day a week I'll transfer my purchase request to the grocer and have it delivered. And when the Palm is old hat I'll talk into a wristwatch sized thingy on my arm that allows me to do that and more.
Now where technology hasn't been as useful is getting us out of the political/economic consumer ratrace we're caught up in. I think that this revolution is coming, as the rise of ubiquitous instant global communications comes about. All real revolutions in the world have come about as a result of people getting together and communicating new ideas of how to organize and rule themselves, for better or worse. The Bolshevik revolution and the literary circles that Ezra Pound and Ernest Hemingway were part of come to mind as good examples here.
Things were bleakest in France before the French revolution too, so maybe it's just a matter of time before we can really identify "SOMETHING BIG" about to happen as a result of technological changes. Things need time to ferment, and quite possibly things will have to get worse before we learn to use our advances in technology to liberate ourselves rather than enslave ourselves. I mean, when in history have geeks around the world been able to gather and shoot the shit like here on /.? Maybe OSS, the FSF and /. are a rivulet of a stream that is building and we don't even know it. It's a nice thought IMHO. Sorry for the long post, it's just something I've been doin some reflecting on recently.
Stupid? You bet. Happilly Americans get to sit on the smiling side of this double standard, but don't expect that to last forever. Yeah but as long as the U.S. has the nukes and the military muscle, the rest of the world WILL put up with it (unless you really foresee a day when Americans will vote in a public representatives who would allow extradition of a business leader to another country to answer to contravening such a questionable law). I'm upset about what happened with iCrave especially (I am Canadian - [used without permission of Molsons]) but what can we do? Very few countries on this planet have any kind of ability to stand up to the U.S. on issues such as this, except as a concerted group, which this situation certainly doesn't warrant. I also agree with many of the other posters here who feel that France is desperately trying to hang on to a view of the world that just doesn't exist anymore (much like the Canadian province of Quebec). It's kinda quaint too though, but I'm concerned as to what might happen if the majority of the French don't wake up and smell the cafe (notice I have qualified the preceding statement -- I'm sure that some of the French citizenry do 'grok' the shape of things to come) soon.
Actually (to respond to my own post - does that lower your karma or get you some bad slash mojo of some sort?) the article on CNET is better, they indicate that the AVERAGE consumption is less than X watts of power. My question is: why does the 600Mhz PIII consume less than one watt (on average) yet the Celeron 500Mhz consumes less than two watts? Is this part of Intel's plans to push consumers towards buying the more expensive PIII (or am I just being paranoid at the end of a long night shift?)?
I was wondering the same thing, I'm betting that the lower consumption is at lower clock speeds, this being an Intel press release. They're not the worst company for vague press releases, but they sure ain't the best either. I'm no Electrical Engineer but from what I understand TransMeta's solution seems to have an edge. Anybody know if it's possible to combine both methods of reducing power consumption? Still as someone else noted, with decent competition it's the consumer that ends up with a better product in the end.
No, but I was hoping that it would be! :~)
Maybe all the /. regulars could get a collection going and send the upper management at MS to such a resort if/when it becomes a reality. Since Redmond is the dark side of the earth they might not notice!
Web Address Search Results karma-pimp.com This Web Address is not listed in the dot com directory(TM). From networksolutions.com
You'd be cooped up with some Russian cosmonauts that might not have showered for several days (or weeks? - sorry I'm not intimately familiar with the bathing facilities on Mir) and there ain't that much room in that space station either. But what the hell, if I had a hundred million or so I'd probably pony up the $$ and go too. Any possibility that this is Bill Gates going up? I guess not, he'd just start a MS space program with mission control running on Win2000.
Please reread my post (and others who mention other sources of friction between IBM and Sun). I didn't suggest that Sun as a corporation has acted or will act in the fashion that Microsoft has, only that Scott M. would like to be the 'top gun' in the IT world, a position (arguably) currently occupied by B. Gates. And I AM implying that I believe that Scott M. would love to have the ability to dominate and bully the rest of the computing sector the way that MS' upper management has. Nor did you touch on my contention that IBM has issues with Sun's approach to licencing re: J2EE. Finally, either Scott McNealy has the whitest teeth of any human alive or the person responsible for retouching his photo on the SUN website was a little over zealous!
Excellent comment... if you can't live with the abysmal performance of RAID-5 config'd volumes, go with RAID-10! As you said disks are cheap (OK, the SSA DASD that we use is definitely NOT cheap) and AIX LVM supports RAID-10 config'ed vols. I'm the dude actually doing the copying to the new RAID-10 configured spindles at our shop. Provides the Cadillac of data redundancy and speed (especially the SSA connexions). Good ole IBM, gotta love 'em. LOL re: your comment on an LVM root volume!
One of the things I heard about porting Linux to the S/390 platform was that the development team had to deal with the 16 interrupts available on the PC vs. 65536 (16^4) on S/390. Hmm... I'd love to be able to run OS/2 on our S/390's in single user mode, even tho it would be like driving a Ferrari on a go-kart track!
I agree... DAMNED funny!
If I remember correctly Sun also sells the J2EE as a complete package and refuses to sell only the individual component(s) a customer might require. I'm not sure, but I believe that IBM was not really impressed with this fact either, as it would require vastly more expensive J2EE licences for customers that they would be developing solutions for. IMHO Scott McNealy (sp?) is just a Bill Gates waiting to be given full control of the sandbox. Which is a shame, because they're another end-to-end technology company that develops both excellent hardware and software.
I've no exposure with other LVM type products mentioned here but I have used AIX's and it's a thing o' beauty. Even if it's redundant technology, I think Linux benefits from having it available. Our shop is Big Blue all the way (we're currently running Linux on S/390 as a test and have 5 RS/6000 frames as well as an S80 and a HACMP S70) and the only thing that ever causes us a problem is the damned automount process on AIX. Course the OS/390 environment never has a problem...
Was that a shot at Corel? I use WordPerfect (for Linux and Win9x) and like it as an application on both platforms. I actually believe that WordPerfect is superior to MS-Word. I don't use any of the other Corel Office suite products, but if they're even nearly as good they'd be fine in my books. I'm hoping that Corel gets all of their apps ported to Linux (they've got Bryce from MetaCreations now as well) before they go belly up. I'd also consider buying the full version of Corel Linux with all the apps if the price was decent. All this despite the fact that I think Michael Cowpland is a flake.
I'm wondering how long the British govt would tolerate this if they found it to be too offensive. I mean, they sent warships halfway around the world to defend their claim to the Falklands. Also, I wonder about rogue governments such as Iraq that might be very interested in such a territory (can't at the moment think of any use they might have for it, but quite possibly there is one). Best of luck in this endeavor though, it's worthwhile and very interesting, IMHO.
I have a Beeawoolf cluster of such video cards directly wired to my brain, the problem is that there are no drivers for them in Linux and tweaking them to do perfect 3-d modelling in unison has fried my visual cortex. Don't try this at home kids! Professional websurfer on a closed course!