Personally I like to think there is, as I find it a bit comforting to know that there'd be something at the end, or else why bother at all.
That's exactly why I believe that the need for that inner comfort you describe, a sense of peace, a sense of certainty and continuity, all naturally evolved as a survival trade that made our ancestors more capable of facing adversity, fear, uncertainty and even the awareness of their own mortality.
For that reason, I doubt that the need for god will go away any time soon. The need to feel we are back in the womb and everything is perfect is just too big to just disappear.
Society and culture may evolve in a direction where we can provide means of fulfilling those needs with our own technology or they may be evolved out as they no longer represent an advantage but at some point may be the opposite. But as it stands now, believers will fight tooth and nail to defend their answers in spite of any form of logical proof of the opposite. In that context, I do believe the discussion and debate between the two camps is irrelevant.
That's narrow-minded. This is the just the beginning of this technology.
Just to name one, imagine in a few years the implications for the field of photography. Potentially, you won't need to bring a bag of expensive lenses designed for very specific focal lengths and apertures. One single morphing lense would replace a complete bag of fixed ones.
For a while, large companies have been looking very seriously to the BYOD (bring your own device) model.
It started with laptops, when companies started giving employees a stipend to buy a computer or do whatever you want with the money, but you need to provide your own system. The company would only support a company-maintained VM and it's your responsibility to run it somewhere.
If you leave the company, the encrypted image is disabled and becomes useless.
Now the same trend is coming to cell phones. VMware already announced an agreement with LG to enable multiple personalities on an ARM-based Android device, so you can bring your own phone, apply a company profile to it, and still get to have your own personal stuff completely separate from the corporate image and apps.
Regardless of what one may think about this, it's coming.
Your comments are absolutely spot on. My wife teaches High School Physics and Biology here in California, and the amount of hours she ends up putting in the job are just ridiculous, not to mention our personal resources.
Nobody considers correcting papers as part of the working hours, or parent conference calls, or after hours meetings, and yet, everybody expects them.
Setting up labs takes additional time. Keeping up to date (in particular if you teach Science) takes a lot of extra time. If I wouldn't be a Science geek myself, I'm not sure our marriage would have lasted 10 years.
Occasionally, the pressure of the whole system affects her so much that she wants to quit. We could be OK only with what I make, luckily, but I'm a big believer that if you really have the love for teaching the next generation as well as the capacity and will, you have to do everything you can to stay on it.
Every once in a while a student from years past shows up at school with tremendous gratitude and fantastic stories. Those days you know you made a difference at least in one life. That keeps you afloat.
Fine. So let's have ONLY people with degrees in Science to go and vote which NSF projects are considered wasteful. Even better, do it in a peer-reviewed way.
I know it's political anathema, but I honestly believe that at some point in history, we'll have to explore the idea that not every vote should have the same value.
VMs are great abstractions, but they are still tied to the 'plumbing' underneath.
If you pack one or more VMs with an XML wrapper that defines ALL your service levels, from Security and Compliance to DR, to expected I/O performance, you get something called a vApp (standarized with the OVF 1.0 format specification).
Now you defined exactly what does your application need. The next step is to make sure the underlying infrastructure is capable of properly fulfilling that SLA. That is achieved by abstracting the concept of datacenter (virtual datacenter in this case). VMware coded that into their vCloud Director product which will make sure that if you land a vApp, the infrastructure can fulfill the SLA.
All this is not as simple as landing a VM on a hosting provider. You need automation, end-to-end security and above all, you need to "trust" that your infrastructure will take care of your SLA automatically. Otherwise trigger-happy lawyers can get involved.
No. The term "cloud" may have started as a buzz word but it has taken some serious shape in less than a year.
For a serious, comprehensive definition, check a short document posted by NIST.
In short, "Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction".
It doesn't have to be necessarily hosted on external providers. It may very well be an internal, Private Cloud. And if it's built on top of open standards such as the vCloud API, you may end up with vApps that can be moved from internal to external clouds and back, as well as hybrids.
I run my whole house from an ESXi box I built from scratch. I first made sure the hardware I bought has drivers to run with ESXi, load the.dd image into a flash drive, boot from there, and it's up and running a minutes.
As I have an Intel NIC with 2 ports, one port is connected to my ISP cable modem, and the other one to my Gig switch. One Ubuntu server VM is configured as a router between both networks, and all the basic services are running there. Firewall, Asterisk, DNS, DHCP, OpenVPN, etc.
Other VMs are in separate virtual switches and provide different functionality. I have a massive 1.5 TB VM as a fileserver (NFS/CIFS, etc) where I store all my data files, and yes I also use Lightroom. That server also hosts my movie and music libraries, but the services for those (DLNA, daap, etc) run on separate VMs.
Overall, I have 8-10 VMs working happily in a single 12 GB RAM box with a regular modern quad-core single CPU Intel chip and 2 x 1.5 TB hard drives.
Granted, I work for VMware and I'm trained on these things, but the setup and maintenance of the system is trivial. I spend more time configuring my VMs properly and making sure everything is properly updated and secured, but other than that, it's a set it and forget it type solution.
Mod parent up. There are many newer alternative solutions these days. The game is not only with Apple and Google. I'm still really impressed with the WDTV box. It eats virtually every file format you through at it and it works fantastically well just with the default settings. One big differentiator for me was support for deep color over HDMI 1.3.
This leaves me no option but running my browsing session in an undoable-mode VM, where after a reboot, all comes back to the previous state. Will this be the only way to maintain my privacy going forward?
As a Chilean living in the US for 12 years now, and contrary to some of my countrymen comments in this particular thread, I believe your analysis is fairly accurate. IMHO, the recent shift to the center-right in Chilean politics, it has to do more with specific local issues (i.e. crime, perceived inefficacy of the previous administration, etc) than overall philosophy.
People tend to be more pragmatic in general than what I used to see back in the 80s where everybody was more polarized pro or against Pinochet. Chile has come a long way since then, and the 'P' word is no longer scary. May of us who were in opposite sides of the debate back then can now talk pretty much openly about it now.
I was CTO of a successful ISP back in the mid 90s in Chile, and back then we were already pushing for Net Neutrality. The biggest issues were that most of the content was foreign origin and the international satellite and later fiber links were very expensive. However, the Chilean Internet itself has grown to unbelievable levels in recent years, and the government itself has embraced it for virtually all sort of interaction with the public, so those are becoming non-issues.
I've done business personally in every single Latin American country, and I truly believe that Chile is Latin America's lab. Ideas get tested there, and if they are successful, they are replicated everywhere. I look forward to see how this law gets implemented (and circumvented) in the coming months, and see how the adjacent countries will use this experience... kudos to my home country for this show of leadership!
Really? did you go to one of the meetings? I doubt it, because you sound like you have no idea what this thing is really about about.
I went to the meeting yesterday and MOST people I met would qualify as independent, centrists with few on the center-left and few on the center-right. All if not most felt disenfranchised. People that originally supported Obama because of the "Change" mantra are disappointed when they see little to no change at all.
I couldn't care less how the Coffee Party was started or who started it. The movement has a life of its own. The people is making it that way.
I see nothing wrong with the idea that just regular folks can get together and talk about politics, and particularly doing so in a climate of civility and respect for other people's point of view. This was poised to happen, given the discourse we see from Washington. Who cares if a former activist and film maker did it? It could have been a retired Admiral and it would be the same.
And before you go bashing me, I have as many Libertarian ideas as I have Socialist ones. I'm all over the spectrum and I'm trying to find a common ground with the system in this country instead of proposing a rip-and-replace model that won't go anywhere.
Denial is the most predictable of human responses. But rest assured: this is the sixth time we've done it. And we are getting exceedingly efficient at it.
Look, Chile implemented some really good construction codes after the 1985 quake in Santiago, which coupled to the remarkable economic growth and new buildings built after that, has resulted in a highly improved situation, which has been proven today. But that is mostly in Santiago. Look at what's going on in Concepción, Talcahuano and the smaller communities in the South...
The fact that building codes are much better now is NOT an excuse to be arrogant. Even 1,000 deaths is a lot of people. People with families. I'm also a Chilean geek living in Silicon Valley, and I've spent all day using all available technology to connect not only with my family, but to help others connect with their loved ones. Live Chilean Internet TV + Tweeter + Facebook + Google Voice with SMS and my Asterisk-Gizmo SIP link + IM + Skype + probably more that I'm forgetting now.
Instead of betting on the number of deaths and brag about the building codes, get off your ass and start helping in any way you can.
I'm pretty amazed nobody seems to have mentioned Metro PCS as a real option. If you happen to live and move in areas that they support, it's by far the cheapest alternative out there.
h4rr4r, I would love to comment on this, but I'm under NDA rules... in any case, I can say a lot of very interesting thing are coming from VMware in 2010 that will show there is still a lot of room for innovation in this field.
I encourage you to reach out to your VMware Systems Engineer and ask for an NDA Roadmap for the Management products. You'll leave that meeting with a smile, and the same warm and cozy feeling you get after having some nice pasta...;-)
This is not a bad thing. For years, the only alternatives for virtual desktops were either proprietary (ICA comes to mind) or OS-dependent (Sun ALP, MSFT RDP, X, NX), leaving VNC as the only OS-independent option. VNC was (and still is) great, but let's face it, it was never intended to be used for real massive VDI-type deployments, even over the WAN. SPICE is supposed to have a good LAN performance, but still doesn't quite cut it for long latencies over the WAN. May be with this move, SPICE can be improved to also address those use cases.
For now, the most advanced thing I've seen is Teradici's PCoIP protocol that works really well in any environment, and they licensed it to VMware to be used in the new View 4 product line as a pure software implementation (as a disclaimer, I work for VMware, but PCoIP blew my mind way before we did anything with them).
In any case, 2010 is shaping to be the year of the virtual desktop, and competition is a good thing!
Yet another interesting alternative is to run your router on a VM. In my case, I also needed to have a file server, an Asterisk server, a web server, virtual desktop, etc, it made sense for me to also run the router on a VM. I built an i7 box with 12GB of RAM and 2x1TB disks for about 900 bucks, installed the free ESXi 4U1 and separate NIC cards for each interface and a virtual DMZ. The box is a rocket, and I now that covers all my needs with a single computer in the house.
Have separate virtual environments then. No data in local PCs. Period. Want to access a system with patient data? X/RDP/ICA into a remote *secure*, datacenter-hosted VM with all the protections and NO Internet access. Want to access the Internet? do the same in a completely different VM with *only* Internet access. It's not rocket science and the technology has been around for quite some time.
The US already collects vasts amount of information as part of the visa application process for any foreign national, all paid by the applicant.
Different countries pay different amounts. I wish the $10 would be the case. Chileans pay $131 just for a visitor's visa, and that doesn't even include all the expenses in getting the required paperwork.
The US unfriendliness towards visitors you mention has been here for a long time, and it's manifested in many different ways, some subtle, some not.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally I like to think there is, as I find it a bit comforting to know that there'd be something at the end, or else why bother at all.
That's exactly why I believe that the need for that inner comfort you describe, a sense of peace, a sense of certainty and continuity, all naturally evolved as a survival trade that made our ancestors more capable of facing adversity, fear, uncertainty and even the awareness of their own mortality.
For that reason, I doubt that the need for god will go away any time soon. The need to feel we are back in the womb and everything is perfect is just too big to just disappear.
Society and culture may evolve in a direction where we can provide means of fulfilling those needs with our own technology or they may be evolved out as they no longer represent an advantage but at some point may be the opposite. But as it stands now, believers will fight tooth and nail to defend their answers in spite of any form of logical proof of the opposite. In that context, I do believe the discussion and debate between the two camps is irrelevant.
There is no longer a need for CDs. Check this absolutely remarkable device that Sony has created for this purpose!
That's narrow-minded. This is the just the beginning of this technology.
Just to name one, imagine in a few years the implications for the field of photography. Potentially, you won't need to bring a bag of expensive lenses designed for very specific focal lengths and apertures. One single morphing lense would replace a complete bag of fixed ones.
For a while, large companies have been looking very seriously to the BYOD (bring your own device) model.
It started with laptops, when companies started giving employees a stipend to buy a computer or do whatever you want with the money, but you need to provide your own system. The company would only support a company-maintained VM and it's your responsibility to run it somewhere.
If you leave the company, the encrypted image is disabled and becomes useless.
Now the same trend is coming to cell phones. VMware already announced an agreement with LG to enable multiple personalities on an ARM-based Android device, so you can bring your own phone, apply a company profile to it, and still get to have your own personal stuff completely separate from the corporate image and apps.
Regardless of what one may think about this, it's coming.
Your comments are absolutely spot on. My wife teaches High School Physics and Biology here in California, and the amount of hours she ends up putting in the job are just ridiculous, not to mention our personal resources.
Nobody considers correcting papers as part of the working hours, or parent conference calls, or after hours meetings, and yet, everybody expects them. Setting up labs takes additional time. Keeping up to date (in particular if you teach Science) takes a lot of extra time. If I wouldn't be a Science geek myself, I'm not sure our marriage would have lasted 10 years. Occasionally, the pressure of the whole system affects her so much that she wants to quit. We could be OK only with what I make, luckily, but I'm a big believer that if you really have the love for teaching the next generation as well as the capacity and will, you have to do everything you can to stay on it.
Every once in a while a student from years past shows up at school with tremendous gratitude and fantastic stories. Those days you know you made a difference at least in one life. That keeps you afloat.
Fine. So let's have ONLY people with degrees in Science to go and vote which NSF projects are considered wasteful. Even better, do it in a peer-reviewed way. I know it's political anathema, but I honestly believe that at some point in history, we'll have to explore the idea that not every vote should have the same value.
VMs are great abstractions, but they are still tied to the 'plumbing' underneath.
If you pack one or more VMs with an XML wrapper that defines ALL your service levels, from Security and Compliance to DR, to expected I/O performance, you get something called a vApp (standarized with the OVF 1.0 format specification).
Now you defined exactly what does your application need. The next step is to make sure the underlying infrastructure is capable of properly fulfilling that SLA. That is achieved by abstracting the concept of datacenter (virtual datacenter in this case). VMware coded that into their vCloud Director product which will make sure that if you land a vApp, the infrastructure can fulfill the SLA.
All this is not as simple as landing a VM on a hosting provider. You need automation, end-to-end security and above all, you need to "trust" that your infrastructure will take care of your SLA automatically. Otherwise trigger-happy lawyers can get involved.
Disclaimer: I work for VMware.
No. The term "cloud" may have started as a buzz word but it has taken some serious shape in less than a year. For a serious, comprehensive definition, check a short document posted by NIST.
In short, "Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction".
It doesn't have to be necessarily hosted on external providers. It may very well be an internal, Private Cloud. And if it's built on top of open standards such as the vCloud API, you may end up with vApps that can be moved from internal to external clouds and back, as well as hybrids.
I run my whole house from an ESXi box I built from scratch. I first made sure the hardware I bought has drivers to run with ESXi, load the .dd image into a flash drive, boot from there, and it's up and running a minutes.
As I have an Intel NIC with 2 ports, one port is connected to my ISP cable modem, and the other one to my Gig switch. One Ubuntu server VM is configured as a router between both networks, and all the basic services are running there. Firewall, Asterisk, DNS, DHCP, OpenVPN, etc.
Other VMs are in separate virtual switches and provide different functionality. I have a massive 1.5 TB VM as a fileserver (NFS/CIFS, etc) where I store all my data files, and yes I also use Lightroom. That server also hosts my movie and music libraries, but the services for those (DLNA, daap, etc) run on separate VMs.
Overall, I have 8-10 VMs working happily in a single 12 GB RAM box with a regular modern quad-core single CPU Intel chip and 2 x 1.5 TB hard drives.
Granted, I work for VMware and I'm trained on these things, but the setup and maintenance of the system is trivial. I spend more time configuring my VMs properly and making sure everything is properly updated and secured, but other than that, it's a set it and forget it type solution.
Mod parent up. There are many newer alternative solutions these days. The game is not only with Apple and Google. I'm still really impressed with the WDTV box. It eats virtually every file format you through at it and it works fantastically well just with the default settings. One big differentiator for me was support for deep color over HDMI 1.3.
This leaves me no option but running my browsing session in an undoable-mode VM, where after a reboot, all comes back to the previous state. Will this be the only way to maintain my privacy going forward?
As a Chilean living in the US for 12 years now, and contrary to some of my countrymen comments in this particular thread, I believe your analysis is fairly accurate. IMHO, the recent shift to the center-right in Chilean politics, it has to do more with specific local issues (i.e. crime, perceived inefficacy of the previous administration, etc) than overall philosophy.
People tend to be more pragmatic in general than what I used to see back in the 80s where everybody was more polarized pro or against Pinochet. Chile has come a long way since then, and the 'P' word is no longer scary. May of us who were in opposite sides of the debate back then can now talk pretty much openly about it now.
I was CTO of a successful ISP back in the mid 90s in Chile, and back then we were already pushing for Net Neutrality. The biggest issues were that most of the content was foreign origin and the international satellite and later fiber links were very expensive. However, the Chilean Internet itself has grown to unbelievable levels in recent years, and the government itself has embraced it for virtually all sort of interaction with the public, so those are becoming non-issues.
I've done business personally in every single Latin American country, and I truly believe that Chile is Latin America's lab. Ideas get tested there, and if they are successful, they are replicated everywhere. I look forward to see how this law gets implemented (and circumvented) in the coming months, and see how the adjacent countries will use this experience... kudos to my home country for this show of leadership!
Really? did you go to one of the meetings? I doubt it, because you sound like you have no idea what this thing is really about about.
I went to the meeting yesterday and MOST people I met would qualify as independent, centrists with few on the center-left and few on the center-right. All if not most felt disenfranchised. People that originally supported Obama because of the "Change" mantra are disappointed when they see little to no change at all.
I couldn't care less how the Coffee Party was started or who started it. The movement has a life of its own. The people is making it that way.
I see nothing wrong with the idea that just regular folks can get together and talk about politics, and particularly doing so in a climate of civility and respect for other people's point of view. This was poised to happen, given the discourse we see from Washington. Who cares if a former activist and film maker did it? It could have been a retired Admiral and it would be the same.
And before you go bashing me, I have as many Libertarian ideas as I have Socialist ones. I'm all over the spectrum and I'm trying to find a common ground with the system in this country instead of proposing a rip-and-replace model that won't go anywhere.
Denial is the most predictable of human responses. But rest assured: this is the sixth time we've done it. And we are getting exceedingly efficient at it.
Look, Chile implemented some really good construction codes after the 1985 quake in Santiago, which coupled to the remarkable economic growth and new buildings built after that, has resulted in a highly improved situation, which has been proven today. But that is mostly in Santiago. Look at what's going on in Concepción, Talcahuano and the smaller communities in the South...
The fact that building codes are much better now is NOT an excuse to be arrogant. Even 1,000 deaths is a lot of people. People with families. I'm also a Chilean geek living in Silicon Valley, and I've spent all day using all available technology to connect not only with my family, but to help others connect with their loved ones. Live Chilean Internet TV + Tweeter + Facebook + Google Voice with SMS and my Asterisk-Gizmo SIP link + IM + Skype + probably more that I'm forgetting now.
Instead of betting on the number of deaths and brag about the building codes, get off your ass and start helping in any way you can.
I'm pretty amazed nobody seems to have mentioned Metro PCS as a real option. If you happen to live and move in areas that they support, it's by far the cheapest alternative out there.
h4rr4r, I would love to comment on this, but I'm under NDA rules... in any case, I can say a lot of very interesting thing are coming from VMware in 2010 that will show there is still a lot of room for innovation in this field.
I encourage you to reach out to your VMware Systems Engineer and ask for an NDA Roadmap for the Management products. You'll leave that meeting with a smile, and the same warm and cozy feeling you get after having some nice pasta... ;-)
This is not a bad thing. For years, the only alternatives for virtual desktops were either proprietary (ICA comes to mind) or OS-dependent (Sun ALP, MSFT RDP, X, NX), leaving VNC as the only OS-independent option. VNC was (and still is) great, but let's face it, it was never intended to be used for real massive VDI-type deployments, even over the WAN. SPICE is supposed to have a good LAN performance, but still doesn't quite cut it for long latencies over the WAN. May be with this move, SPICE can be improved to also address those use cases.
For now, the most advanced thing I've seen is Teradici's PCoIP protocol that works really well in any environment, and they licensed it to VMware to be used in the new View 4 product line as a pure software implementation (as a disclaimer, I work for VMware, but PCoIP blew my mind way before we did anything with them).
In any case, 2010 is shaping to be the year of the virtual desktop, and competition is a good thing!
Which is interesting as that may explain why I'm getting 54ms packet roundtrips with less hops than OpenDNS (17ms) and I'm right in the SF Bay Area...
Yet another interesting alternative is to run your router on a VM. In my case, I also needed to have a file server, an Asterisk server, a web server, virtual desktop, etc, it made sense for me to also run the router on a VM. I built an i7 box with 12GB of RAM and 2x1TB disks for about 900 bucks, installed the free ESXi 4U1 and separate NIC cards for each interface and a virtual DMZ. The box is a rocket, and I now that covers all my needs with a single computer in the house.
This reminds me of the Genesis of the Daleks...
Will Davros be next?
Have separate virtual environments then. No data in local PCs. Period. Want to access a system with patient data? X/RDP/ICA into a remote *secure*, datacenter-hosted VM with all the protections and NO Internet access. Want to access the Internet? do the same in a completely different VM with *only* Internet access. It's not rocket science and the technology has been around for quite some time.
That's exactly how PasswordMaker works. Simple and clever, and a remarkable improvement over the way people do passwords any way.
The US already collects vasts amount of information as part of the visa application process for any foreign national, all paid by the applicant.
Different countries pay different amounts. I wish the $10 would be the case. Chileans pay $131 just for a visitor's visa, and that doesn't even include all the expenses in getting the required paperwork.
The US unfriendliness towards visitors you mention has been here for a long time, and it's manifested in many different ways, some subtle, some not.