This has everything to do with cost and nothing to do with Microsoft. Consider VoIP... people are deliberately choosing telephony services that are less reliable and lower quality than POTS, because VoIP is cheaper. If you want 99.999% uptime, that's fine -- but you're going to pay for it. High availability services require better equipment, redundant equipment that doesn't come cheap and more, higher quality staff to operate it. So it costs more.
I've been in the technology services business for a long time, and with few exceptions, 80%+ customers want their services are delivered as cheaply as possible. Most hospital systems don't even have a 99.999% availability requirement. The 20% the want varying levels of higher than normal availability usually have a government regulation, SLA or other mandate requiring that they do so.
The Russians still have shortwave communications on their ships, because they have assumed since the 70's that the US will shoot down some or all of their space assets in the event of a war.
The US hasn't done that, and the planned migration to drone attack aircraft is utterly dependent on satellite communication. When the Chinese decide to attack Taiwan or assert claims on the Spratley Islands, the first shot will probably be at US communications.
You're assuming that a farm is like a razor blade -- instantaneously interchangable.
That's fundamentally against a thousand years of law regarding property rights -- which have established, which a few exceptions, that you are free to utilize your property as you see fit. That's one reason why Heinlein was a science <i>fiction</i> author, and not a politician.
The scheme becomes even more absurd if you extend it to financial securities. If a share of an undervalued company is worth $5, but some hedge fund comes along and decides that it's worth $10 to them, they'll force you to sell that stock at $5.
Without the right to control your property, "ownership" is not a very useful thing.
That's fundamentally unfair, as the value of property varies depending on who you are. The value of 500 acres to a farmer is significant, but tied the the value of his production. To a developer, the value of 500 1-acre plots is far greater.
So whose value do you use? The farmer cannot afford to pay the taxes for 500 1-acre homesites, but he also has zero defense against deep pockets under your system.
At the end of the day, whatever closes the deal wins.
If I walk into a friends house and see a big Sony TV, then see a big Sony TV in a movie product placement, walk by a nice, big Sony TV in Best Buy, and finally buy a big Sony TV from Amazon via a text-based ad, who deserves the money?
This Microsoft thing sounds interesting, but I think that it's overstating the value of online ads. Typically, online ads aren't for branding... they are attempts at guessing what you want based on context (search) or by tricking you to click.
Fujitsu makes a series of ultra-portable notebooks with 6" screens, but they are full-featured laptops. They can get pricy, but the quality is top-notch, and service is available globally.
Nope, it's federal. California Senator Dianne Feinstein slipped the restrictions in a bill so she could say that she was doing something about methamphetamine.
Of course now, people running meth labs are using even more dangerous materials, so it really wasn't that effective.
I think you're right on - I had a similar experience.
IMHO, a big problem with Java is that it's easy to skate along, while remaining clueless. At my university, everyone basically flunked the senior systems programming and network programming courses (based on C). I was a superstar, receiving an "A-" for getting 19/150 points on the systems programming final. There was literally dozens of people who got a 0 on the exam.
Part of that was that it was a big state school that frankly, sucked. The masochist tendencies of the professors didn't help either. (one of the assignments was to simulate an old Sun architecture in C (which nobody had used), working alone, in 4 weeks) The problem that I had is that they were fucking over students in their junior/senior year who should have washed out in the freshman spring semester.
The problem is that regulatory/compliance issues make it difficult to place resources in the field, because it is difficult and costly to maintain. One lost backup tape could be a real disaster. You have to balance business needs against cost, security, etc. There's no "one size fits all" solution.
Here's how we're moving ahead with centralization in a large distributed environment with about 50,000 users and 1,000 branches. We're reducing the server count by about 40%, and the cost by 70% versus a couple of years ago: - Most sites with 10-75 people get a headless, stripped down box (~$2,000) that runs our desktop management software - Medium/Large sites (75+) get a file server, which fulfills some other roles as well - Large and VIP sites get a domain controller, mainly for availability purposes. - A few "very large" (800+) sites get a 100MB WAN connection and use the data center services.
We looked at a few other solutions, with mixed results: - WAFS/WAAS looked great, but the solution cost was almost the same as rolling out servers. Additionally, most of our applications are "thin" already, so we weren't really gaining much. - Distributed AD servers are purely an availability play. (If your circuits/core servers are sized correctly) - NAS also looked promising, but the cheap solutions weren't very manageable at our scale, and the manageable solutions weren't cheap. - No backups are done on site, we're rolling out a distributed backup system that we de-dupe the data globally and backup to a data center. If you're using old backup software like TSM, Legato, etc, you MUST go shop around, the newer solutions are way way better and probably have lower administrative costs. - Networks are getting faster and cheaper. We're seeing 3MB connections available to replace 512k frame relay connections at a slightly lower cost. We'll be switching as our network infrastructure gets upgraded. - If your network supports it, multicast can make it much cheaper and easier to provision your workstations. Most management tools (Altiris, SMS, Tivoli, LANDesk, etc) support it.
Are you smoking crack? There are hundreds of natural gas power stations that spend most of their time idle, waiting for a demand spike that makes them cost-effective.
New York even has a hydro station that pumps water into a man-made lake on a mountain at night, and drains it to generate power during the day.
The whole point of a relational DBMS is to store, link and maintain the integrity of data in tables based on the relationships among the data.
MapReduce is about processing data... it's not focused on maintaining integrity, and the kinds of datasets suitable for MapReduce probably don't have well defined relationships.
Well you see, the thing is, that didn't happen. The 53% inflation happened over 25 years. That's an average of 2-3% a year. Do you happen to live in Argentina?
Not sure what's subjective -- gas that was $1.00/gallon in 1998 is $3.25 now. Milk that was $2.19 in 1998 is $4.25 now. A plumber was about $30/hr in 1998, and is $60-90 now, mostly due to health insurance costs. The official inflation numbers don't include things like most foods and fuel, so I take little stock in them.
Well, I wasn't around in 1913 for the $0.59/lb prime rib, so I missed most of that. I was 4 in 1982, so I haven't felt the inflationary effect since then either. Like most people, I've noticed a large increase in food, fuel and service prices since 2003 or so. And yes, I know what inflation is.
My point was, don't point fingers and call people stupid for daring to expect that their pension would come to them. And don't expect any sympathy if you fuck up your 401(k) investments or happen to retire during a bear market. You won't have a PBGC teat to suck on, so stock up on Alpo.
If Mozilla wants to be a factor in corporate deployments, they need to make it easier for IT staff to actually use Firefox. Mozilla is a real company that makes pretty good money -- there's no excuse for that.
At my workplace, we did some testing of Firefox and found that it worked fine, but had a number of problems, including: - Lack of a good, scriptable installation system - No patches, only automatic downloads which pull down full installations that take place seemingly every other day - Lack of documentation for the rube goldberg installation mechanisms.
IE 7 really sucks, to the point that my big corporate environment was willing to give it a shot. Too bad it's downsides for deployment were so bad.
You're assuming that the current 50/50 split between Republicans and Democrats has existed forever -- it hasn't. The Democrats dominated congress and set the political agenda from 1930 to 1994.
Neither party is extremist -- they are mainstream parties that soak up ideas as they become popular to the electorate. Some of these are from third parties, others from groups within political parties.
Bill Clinton is a perfect example of this. Clinton was a strong democrat, but was not in sync with the traditional democratic party line at the time.
I contend that the system isn't broken at all -- the media is broken, and embraces sensationalizing "the sky is falling" horseshit.
As citizens don't their desires count as anyone else's? You and I may not agree with them but that doesn't mean their voice should be muffled.
Empowering parties of single-issue zealots magnifies their power -- a bloc of ten radicals can impose harsh conditions on the passage of routine law. Want the budget to pass? Only if you criminalize abortion or legalize marijuana or teach creationism in public schools.
I would also shy away from calling Libertarians "fringe", there's a lot more Libs that I know than actual Republicans or Democrats.
Yeah, lots of people identify with the libertarians -- but then their parents get old, sick and expensive to care for, so big government programs like Medicare become a good thing.
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iTMS is selling commodities at fixed margins. So they make money, but not at the margins that Apple is used to.
But we do. If we didn't have access to frozen vegetables, everyone would still can green beans.
If my stupid blackberry breaks, I deal with it and use the phone, or send a regular email. Life goes on.
This has everything to do with cost and nothing to do with Microsoft. Consider VoIP... people are deliberately choosing telephony services that are less reliable and lower quality than POTS, because VoIP is cheaper. If you want 99.999% uptime, that's fine -- but you're going to pay for it. High availability services require better equipment, redundant equipment that doesn't come cheap and more, higher quality staff to operate it. So it costs more.
I've been in the technology services business for a long time, and with few exceptions, 80%+ customers want their services are delivered as cheaply as possible. Most hospital systems don't even have a 99.999% availability requirement. The 20% the want varying levels of higher than normal availability usually have a government regulation, SLA or other mandate requiring that they do so.
The Russians still have shortwave communications on their ships, because they have assumed since the 70's that the US will shoot down some or all of their space assets in the event of a war.
The US hasn't done that, and the planned migration to drone attack aircraft is utterly dependent on satellite communication. When the Chinese decide to attack Taiwan or assert claims on the Spratley Islands, the first shot will probably be at US communications.
You're assuming that a farm is like a razor blade -- instantaneously interchangable.
That's fundamentally against a thousand years of law regarding property rights -- which have established, which a few exceptions, that you are free to utilize your property as you see fit. That's one reason why Heinlein was a science <i>fiction</i> author, and not a politician.
The scheme becomes even more absurd if you extend it to financial securities. If a share of an undervalued company is worth $5, but some hedge fund comes along and decides that it's worth $10 to them, they'll force you to sell that stock at $5.
Without the right to control your property, "ownership" is not a very useful thing.
That's fundamentally unfair, as the value of property varies depending on who you are. The value of 500 acres to a farmer is significant, but tied the the value of his production. To a developer, the value of 500 1-acre plots is far greater.
So whose value do you use? The farmer cannot afford to pay the taxes for 500 1-acre homesites, but he also has zero defense against deep pockets under your system.
At the end of the day, whatever closes the deal wins.
If I walk into a friends house and see a big Sony TV, then see a big Sony TV in a movie product placement, walk by a nice, big Sony TV in Best Buy, and finally buy a big Sony TV from Amazon via a text-based ad, who deserves the money?
This Microsoft thing sounds interesting, but I think that it's overstating the value of online ads. Typically, online ads aren't for branding... they are attempts at guessing what you want based on context (search) or by tricking you to click.
Hydrazine is just the fuel for the control surfaces. Electrical power is provided by nuclear material. That material won't burn up.
The US has had ASAT technology for decades, which is why the Russian Navy has equipped its ships with shortwave radios.
Office 2007 is basically an advertisement for the not-free Sharepoint, whatever it's called this week.
Users can't find things that the need to do, but they do discover all of these new and wonderous features.
Fujitsu makes a series of ultra-portable notebooks with 6" screens, but they are full-featured laptops. They can get pricy, but the quality is top-notch, and service is available globally.
Nope, it's federal. California Senator Dianne Feinstein slipped the restrictions in a bill so she could say that she was doing something about methamphetamine.
Of course now, people running meth labs are using even more dangerous materials, so it really wasn't that effective.
Pretty easily. Your needs are not the same as everyone else.
Is that Microsoft Office blows OO.org away. Completely. Microsoft could go with ODF and still compete very well against OO.
I think you're right on - I had a similar experience.
IMHO, a big problem with Java is that it's easy to skate along, while remaining clueless. At my university, everyone basically flunked the senior systems programming and network programming courses (based on C). I was a superstar, receiving an "A-" for getting 19/150 points on the systems programming final. There was literally dozens of people who got a 0 on the exam.
Part of that was that it was a big state school that frankly, sucked. The masochist tendencies of the professors didn't help either. (one of the assignments was to simulate an old Sun architecture in C (which nobody had used), working alone, in 4 weeks) The problem that I had is that they were fucking over students in their junior/senior year who should have washed out in the freshman spring semester.
The problem is that regulatory/compliance issues make it difficult to place resources in the field, because it is difficult and costly to maintain. One lost backup tape could be a real disaster. You have to balance business needs against cost, security, etc. There's no "one size fits all" solution.
Here's how we're moving ahead with centralization in a large distributed environment with about 50,000 users and 1,000 branches. We're reducing the server count by about 40%, and the cost by 70% versus a couple of years ago:
- Most sites with 10-75 people get a headless, stripped down box (~$2,000) that runs our desktop management software
- Medium/Large sites (75+) get a file server, which fulfills some other roles as well
- Large and VIP sites get a domain controller, mainly for availability purposes.
- A few "very large" (800+) sites get a 100MB WAN connection and use the data center services.
We looked at a few other solutions, with mixed results:
- WAFS/WAAS looked great, but the solution cost was almost the same as rolling out servers. Additionally, most of our applications are "thin" already, so we weren't really gaining much.
- Distributed AD servers are purely an availability play. (If your circuits/core servers are sized correctly)
- NAS also looked promising, but the cheap solutions weren't very manageable at our scale, and the manageable solutions weren't cheap.
- No backups are done on site, we're rolling out a distributed backup system that we de-dupe the data globally and backup to a data center. If you're using old backup software like TSM, Legato, etc, you MUST go shop around, the newer solutions are way way better and probably have lower administrative costs.
- Networks are getting faster and cheaper. We're seeing 3MB connections available to replace 512k frame relay connections at a slightly lower cost. We'll be switching as our network infrastructure gets upgraded.
- If your network supports it, multicast can make it much cheaper and easier to provision your workstations. Most management tools (Altiris, SMS, Tivoli, LANDesk, etc) support it.
Are you smoking crack? There are hundreds of natural gas power stations that spend most of their time idle, waiting for a demand spike that makes them cost-effective.
New York even has a hydro station that pumps water into a man-made lake on a mountain at night, and drains it to generate power during the day.
Thanks for pointing that out -- I hadn't realized that the article was part of a corporate blog!
Sounds like the rumblings of grumpy DBAs.
The whole point of a relational DBMS is to store, link and maintain the integrity of data in tables based on the relationships among the data.
MapReduce is about processing data... it's not focused on maintaining integrity, and the kinds of datasets suitable for MapReduce probably don't have well defined relationships.
Well you see, the thing is, that didn't happen. The 53% inflation happened over 25 years. That's an average of 2-3% a year. Do you happen to live in Argentina?
Not sure what's subjective -- gas that was $1.00/gallon in 1998 is $3.25 now. Milk that was $2.19 in 1998 is $4.25 now. A plumber was about $30/hr in 1998, and is $60-90 now, mostly due to health insurance costs. The official inflation numbers don't include things like most foods and fuel, so I take little stock in them.
Well, I wasn't around in 1913 for the $0.59/lb prime rib, so I missed most of that. I was 4 in 1982, so I haven't felt the inflationary effect since then either. Like most people, I've noticed a large increase in food, fuel and service prices since 2003 or so. And yes, I know what inflation is.
My point was, don't point fingers and call people stupid for daring to expect that their pension would come to them. And don't expect any sympathy if you fuck up your 401(k) investments or happen to retire during a bear market. You won't have a PBGC teat to suck on, so stock up on Alpo.
It looks like we're in the beginning of a inflationary cycle, so we'll see how you feel about your financial brilliance in a couple of years.
If Mozilla wants to be a factor in corporate deployments, they need to make it easier for IT staff to actually use Firefox. Mozilla is a real company that makes pretty good money -- there's no excuse for that.
At my workplace, we did some testing of Firefox and found that it worked fine, but had a number of problems, including:
- Lack of a good, scriptable installation system
- No patches, only automatic downloads which pull down full installations that take place seemingly every other day
- Lack of documentation for the rube goldberg installation mechanisms.
IE 7 really sucks, to the point that my big corporate environment was willing to give it a shot. Too bad it's downsides for deployment were so bad.
You're assuming that the current 50/50 split between Republicans and Democrats has existed forever -- it hasn't. The Democrats dominated congress and set the political agenda from 1930 to 1994.
Neither party is extremist -- they are mainstream parties that soak up ideas as they become popular to the electorate. Some of these are from third parties, others from groups within political parties.
Bill Clinton is a perfect example of this. Clinton was a strong democrat, but was not in sync with the traditional democratic party line at the time.
I contend that the system isn't broken at all -- the media is broken, and embraces sensationalizing "the sky is falling" horseshit.
Empowering parties of single-issue zealots magnifies their power -- a bloc of ten radicals can impose harsh conditions on the passage of routine law. Want the budget to pass? Only if you criminalize abortion or legalize marijuana or teach creationism in public schools.
Yeah, lots of people identify with the libertarians -- but then their parents get old, sick and expensive to care for, so big government programs like Medicare become a good thing.