I think there are benefits to an event like this(I wish it didn't involve disasters of course) but if you look at cnn and their current home page you will see that they did a MAJOR site re-design to get their page to serve easily over their available bandwidth(which is apparently much too small for their regular pages in a case of emergency). For those who still can't get it to load, it is one.jpg about two inches high and three inches wide and about ten or twelve bullet points.
This is a change for the better in my opinion, the news sources have themselves to blame for their high-bandwidth sites which obviously can't cut the mustard when the heat is on.
Oh I have no doubt that the media isn't defective. It is damaged. Different thing, and I know that somehow, in my house with three small children, we damaged it. But, the point is, if I am not buying something that is bound to the media, if I am buying the right to use a copy of the software, does it matter which copy I use? If I bought that right, then I should be able to download an ISO image and burn a new copy if I need to, or get a new copy from a store. Whereas with music CDs and books you buy a physical copy, not a license. You have more rights to a physical copy than you do to a license. They have to choose which distribution scheme they will use. Licence it and replace unusable media(regardless of cause) or tie it to the media we bought and we can do whatever the hell we like with it(except copy it and distribute it).
See, this is even funnier. I was setting up a little webcam that my DSL company gave me when I ordered my service and I needed to install some more software from my Windows CDROM. I put the CDROM in the drive and it BSODed on me. It seems the CDROM was scratched or dirty. So I clean it up, but it is scratched, and try again. BSOD. More cleaning. BSOD. Maybe my other CDROM drive? BSOD.
Hmm. Wonder what would happen if I took that back to MS and said "It's busted." And get this, I DID buy a license to use that software which supposedly IS NOT tied to the physical disk. Seems that companies are picking whichever they feel is more convenient for them. License so they can say you can't have access to the media however you want, or media-bound when something goes wrong and you have to buy another copy.
I just had to reply to this seeing as I'm experiencing many of those frustrations at work myself at the moment. Here is a quick summary of the genesis of the project. The big boss(my boss's boss) said he wants a way to look at any of our testing environments and be able to tell what release version of all the different apps we're using as well as all the third-party software we're using. Add in a way to track all the costs of those products and the people responsible for vendor relations. Then throw in fields and links to the different management pieces of this(what release each environment is housing and who is the release manager) and the hardware each environment consists of(server name, IP, admin, etc). All in all a fairly complex database for a project with no funding. Oh, and a web-based front end with security access control and various levels of update/viewing access. Myself and a co-worker worked, on our own time mostly, to put together a database model and implement a mock-up database in Access to get proof of concept so maybe we could get money to do it right with Oracle and Java(the corporate standards, don't rail on me for these choices).
Project managers would see the balsa mockup and tell the construction crews to just put the mockup in place because it's good enough to use as is.
The Access database is now being populated with real data. Given Access's pitiful relationship modeling abilities(Access '97 no less) many of the queries we had designed to make this useful if it had a full-featured database are un-implementable. But it exists and people are starting to use it. Kinda. This brings me to your second point.
Somebody would stop the project halfway through construction to insist that it be changed from a simple truss to a suspension bridge.
After designing the data model and having a couple of meetings with various team leads to assure it met their needs and that everything they needed tracked would be tracked and all the relationships as defined jived with reality, the project was shelved for a little while. When a licensing mandate came down from high up, we scrambled to find our licenses for all our software and accurately report what we were and weren't using and their costs. Several people pulled all-niters and weekenders to gather this data and put it into various spreadsheets and notes with vastly different formats than what we had designed the database to accomodate, after all the project had been semi-shelved right? Now the big boss wants this data put into the database. I train a few people in our oncall group(who is here 24/7 and whom the task of data entry had been given) on how the database works and how to correlate the spreadsheet data into the actual database fields. They start keying data and assure me everything is fine and they'll call if they have any questions. A little while later I'm checking on them and I find out that another manager has come in(not my boss, but one of her peers, both report to the same big boss) and told them that she can't understand how the database works, and that she wants everything to look like the spreadsheets. So the oncall group, unknown to me, stops inputting data into the database my co-worker and I designed, and builds a new one, drastically different from the old one with no capabilities to track anything more than very basic info about third party apps.
Somebody else would stop the project to insist that it be changed from a suspension bridge to a tunnel, and furthermore, to demand delivery of a tunnel for simple truss prices.
We recently had a re-org where another group, with even more environments was brought in. Of course they were told by the big boss that they would need to get their info into our database. So I had a couple converstations with their management and they sent me TONS of reports on the configurations of their servers and their software.(I guess now is a good time to mention that this is a fortune 100 company and that we're dealing with 15 environments each containing dozens of enterprise class servers in different datacenters as well as several mainframes. The hardware budget for my department alone, not counting this new group, is over 60 Million each year. Yes, we own several E10,000 servers. Oh and we also support various training regions in the classrooms where they train reps. About seven or eight hundred desktops of various ages and equipment configurations in each region.) Yep, desktop, midrange, mainframe. So now we've gone from tracking our group, to tracking a tiny subset of our group, to tracking our group and a huge amount of data in another group. Grr.
Massive traffic jams would occur as users stop at each end and call for help because they can't figure out how to drive across.
Oh, did I mention that I have emails from several supervisors wanting to know how to access this information and that I've suddenly become the keeper of the Access Licenses? And I no longer even recognize the database they're trying to get access to?
Architects would be sent out to tow cars and fill potholes.
Oh, did I mention that they have sent all this data to ME, even though I've specifically mentioned that I'm not responsible for data entry and given them contact information for the people who are? Oh, and they're expecting status updates.
The communications system that glues the Internet together was designed for no more than 4.3 billion computers and devices -- thought to be plenty 20 years ago. Half the connection points have already been assigned, and the life span for the remainder is estimated at five years. At that point, a "No Vacancy" sign may have to go up.
First the Y2K bug, now the IPv4 debacle. You're making technology look bad! How will you ever get widespread acceptance if people think you don't think far enough ahead to have your infrastructure scale?
Seriously, I think this is going to grow into something like the Y2K thing. Sure people won't be stockpiling on water and food like a few people I know did, but the reporting of this limitation could cause the public to think "Well, if I get involved in this thing, it'll just max out and then I'll be stuck with a useless 3G phone, or whatever."
Hell, my company is already taking IP addresses away from our servers and workstations and putting us on NAT because they need those IP address spaces for customers. This is a serious problem for the growth and mainstream acceptance of a wired world.
One of the best things about having the +1 bonus is the ability to come in late, about a week late, to a conversation and still get your comments archived. Now weather someone ever reads the Slashdot archives is another matter entirely. So this may have been completely useless, but hopefully someone will read it.
Your analogy of multitasking in a computer and the shifting of menial tasks in everyday activities into the subconscious is kind of off base. There are significant differences between the way computers multitask and the way biological organisms multitask. In a word, it's called evolution.
Think about it this way, the tasks are still getting loaded, and it's every bit as much info that has to be loaded into memory as it ever was. BUT! The hardware has been optimized in the interium. The real analogy would be a computer that has it's hardware re-designed to incorporate the logic needed to handle those menial tasks so it doesn't have to loaded into general purpose memory and have generic logic handle it. When a task of that type comes down it's routed to the special purpose hardware and is processed much faster so it can take the next input that much faster. Learned tasks have the appearance of being easier to multitask, but it's because the hardware is continually being optimized. Moving away from a general purpose machine into a large array of specialized machines with a smart distributor to spread the tasks around may be really efficient, but it's really bad for flexibility.
Now that we've gotten the human/machine multitasking analogies straightened out, I agree with the article in that multitasking in humans is difficult when none of those tasks are related or something that is done on a regular basis.
Now if you've ever seen what medical students have to learn, it involves huge amounts of memorization and studying upwards of 12-18 hours per day (including classes) much of the time. Obviously unless you are some freak of nature you cannot concentrate effectively for that long. (yes this includes programmers too...)
Luckily most good programmers are freaks of nature.;)
That's a very interesting idea. I've always loved the older generation and my grandmother(the only grandparent I ever knew) was very dear to me. As such I can attest to the ability of the older people to get online and how much they enjoy it. Hell, I'm a 20 something and just got DSL. My mom is 60(I was born fairly late in life) has had hers for almost a year now and before that had a dedicated phone line for dial-up. She's using the net for completely different things than I am, primarially family trees and tracing genealogy, but we're both avid net users. The older generation is a precious resource for the younger ones. I wouldn't be half as mature as I am if I hadn't had constant interaction with older people while I was growing up.(my mother was born when my grandmother was thirtysomething and I was born when my mother was 35 so there is over a 70 year age difference between my grandmother and I. Larger than most age differences.) Learning to bridge the generation gap is beneficial for both edges of the ravine.
That's true. For those of you who don't understand the comment, here is the deal. First Saturday takes a fair amount of real estate when all the vendors are there. Some of the parking lot owners rent their spaces and they charge some cash to set up in the premium spots right off the road. Some of the little guys, including me when I go down there to sell, set up in smaller lots off the main road and hope people wander by. One of the prime spots for used/personal stuff, the part that would be most like a swap instead of a sidewalk sale held by commercial entities, was under the bridge for the highway. This is a no-parking zone and the city started forcing the little guys selling out of their minvans and trucks out. A lot of the real obscure/vintage stuff went away when that happened.
That having been said, I think the last of it's glory is still head and shoulders above Fry's in both selection and quality of service, even if they weren't a fraction of Fry's prices. I have never bought a computer(or any major components) retail and as long as I live within driving distance of First Saturday, I never plan to.
Hey now! Some of my best friends look like the Unibomber!:) (but seriously, they do. They're Linux wizards too)
The closest Fry's is about 45 minutes away from me. I only go there when I'm buying something you can't get without going retail, like Lego Mindstorms, and then I make sure I inspect it closely before I buy it. I never buy anything there if I can avoid it, but they have a good selection. Just be sure you buy quality because returns are a sonofabitch. Hell I could stand in line with hundreds of dollars worth of merchandise and they'd gleefully ignore me for over half an hour. Fry's simply isn't worth the headache. Convenience on the initial purchase isn't worth the shitty service and high prices.
I haven't been to Fry's in about six months(since my last Mindstorms purchasing binge). I miss Fry's like I miss hemmoriods.
So you take a trip to Fry's to laugh hysterically at price tags?
Frankly I can see no other reason for going to Fry's at all.
I was exaggerating a bit, I've never been actually tossed out, but I have gotten funny looks over the silly grin I wear on my face looking at the same hardware I just bought for over twice the price.
LOL, that brought back some memories. I've been to First Saturday many times. One of the first times I ever went was with my brother and we got down there around 3AM. Having gone to school in downtown Dallas when I was in High School I didn't really feel that nervous, but with all this high-end hardware walking around and the poor lighting in the back-alley parking lots they press into service for the customers(the main ones are being used for the vendors tents) I figured there might be muggings. I mentioned this to my brother who then cracked me up with a quote that I have repeated to everyone I have ever told about First Saturday and I which I will repeat here.
"First Saturday is the safest you will ever be on the streets of downtown Dallas at 3AM. Look around, wall to wall nerds."
As a resident of the D/FW area and a regular at First Saturday I can attest to it's coolness on a first hand basis. It's been called "The largest open-air electronics sidewalk sale on the planet" and has had writeups in everything from local newspapers to the Wall Street Journal. Here's the scoop. On Friday night the vendors start to roll in, they sell all night and are gone by noon the next day. Mostly these are people who own computer shops throught the metroplex, but we get some of the larger vendors from further away too. Everyone pitches tents, sets up generators, cash registers, etc and sets tons, I mean TONS, of OEM and retail hardware on conference tables in the middle of a parking lot just west of the freeway. The prices are really amazing too. Every time I go to First Saturday I make it a point to go to Fry's the next day and browse for exactly the items I just bought off the street the night before. I've been stopped several times by people asking why I was laughing, and one time escorted from the store for laughing too hard at their prices. I've never paid more than half of what Fry's was asking for anything. Memory, motherboards, CPUs, CD burners, ANYTHING. Same brand names, same models, everything. I've never paid retail for any piece of hardware I've bought in any situation other than impulse buying. I've built three systems from parts purchased at First Saturday in the past four years and I intend to do it again as my current machine is over two years old. Cost me about 1200 bucks for the parts to build it at the time, and is just now starting to get a little behind the times. Think extreme bleeding edge two years ago for less than 1200 bucks.
I've introduced people in the office to First Saturday. The last time my co-workers went they all came back with factory refurbished 21" Sony Trinitron monitors for $325 the first time and the next month the price was $275. They got business cards and three year warranties from the companies. One of them had problems with it, took it back to the shop and they gave him another. They have 15" flat-panel HP monitors with integrated sound for about $300. I got my 120 watt, powered, shielded speakers for my workstation at the office for $6. That's not a typo. Six dollars. They sound good too.
I've also sold items there. My brother was a SA for a company who did a bunch of upgrades a while back and we hauled all the old desktop hardware out there and sold it out of the back of the company van. Good stuff, could have made some nice little BSD boxes, dirt cheap. Mix and match all the stuff you want. You want extra memory? Five bucks a stick for the simms you need.
That having been said, I am kind of disappointed with First Saturday recently. It's been going on for 30+ years now and originally you could get anything, I mean anything, electronic there. From single resistors to full computer sets. I saw military codebooks and collections of Magic cards there too. Now it's shifting from component-oriented to package oriented. They'll sell you bare-bones systems for $575 for a nice MB and Athlon based system, but without any of the toys like a DVD-ROM(bought mine there about a year ago for $85 for a 6X, damn fine price, and a major brand name too) You can still buy the component level stuff, but it's not the emphasis anymore. I guess it's just the world that has changed. The resistor is no longer a component, the board is a component. Sigh, I'm showing my age apparently.
speed reading is outlawed. Think about it, buy ten hours worth of reading, finish it in two hours, loan it to a friend who is also a speed reader, they finish in two hours, repeat. Five people who read the book for the price of one! That's four cases of piracy! Four lost sales! This travesty cannot be allowed.
Seriously though, this is still dumb. It will continue to take the goods away from the people who paid good money for them. I would doubt the legality of these lisencing schemes.
that it'll be taken seriously not because I do it on intelligently or on the net, but because I'm 15? In that case Katz prepare to have your arse roasted by a 15 year old technophile with mom and dad's Compaq at his fingertips!
Beware all ye who would criticize the genius of Lucas, for is it not written in the revised, updated and George (dubya) Bush approved version of The Constitution of the United States of the Multinational Corporations (now available as an Adobe(R)(TM)(C)All Rights Reserved E-book for $19.99 per view, order today! Operators are standing by!) In article I section 1 that George Lucas is hereby declared the greatest storyteller of all time and all law abiding and Bill Gates fearing citizens are required to pay homage to him by seeing any and all movies with the name Star Wars multiple times and by further paying homage by standing in ridiculously long lines at the local Wal-Mart to purchase dozens of non-biodegradable plastic toys for the betterment of our young(isn't it grand of us to think of the children?).
Yea and those who dare not to venerate the name of Lucas and pay the required homage shall be stricken from the rolls of the nation. They will be outcasts in their own land of birth. Denied bland conversation with their fellow citizens about the masterworks of Lucas, they will wallow in their anguish. They shall be stricken from the lists of people to be protected in time of war and their names will be added to the lists of those who will not recieve the bounty of this great land in the form of Blue Light specials and the occasional Buy one Get one FREE sales at the local Piggly Wiggly. They shall be stricken from the rolls of every good and beneficient policy this great conglomerate bestows upon it's consumers. Moreover their name shall be dupliated in all databases related to taxation and if they ever contest this clause, they are subject to auditing by the BSA, RIAA, MPAA and Rectal-Probers-R-Us.
So let it be written(in tiny print behind an encryption scheme which may not be broken under article two of this constitution, formerly known as the DMCA) so let it be done.
Now if you missed this update to the supreme law of our land, that isn't my fault. I suggest you rush right out to your computer and fully enable all the update packages you can and register any and all software you have. I got this preview of our new constitution as a bonus when I downloaded the latest version of Minsweeper, the official game of the land. Baseball isn't bringing in enough money it seems.
Finally a reason NOT to patch my linux box. Come on, somebody write one of these, please? And if anybody asks, I just say "What patch?" *Maniacal laughter*
ION has been released for both commercial and residential services, but only in about ten or twelve cities, and only in the US. It has moved very slowly, due to both last-mile problems(the frustration over this is the main impetus behind the wireless broadband campaign Sprint started) and pricing/business problems. When ION was started, it was a major pain to set up a customer(taking a month or more and relying on things like faxes between different business units and groups for exchanging information to set everything up). This manual process was error-prone and a major pain in the butt. Beyond that, they originally used VoIP instead of VoATM, so the voice quality sucked and the initial reviews were pretty harsh. After this arrow in the back, they switched to VoATM and implemented tons of automation in the back end to speed the delivery process and make it less of a pain/error prone. Currently ION services, all the communiation/automation pieces for setting up a customer is at v3.5b and is getting better all the time. It now takes a couple days from order to live instead of a month or so, from a technical standpoint, billing is what takes time in reality.
The scary part about all this? It looks like Sprint is helping build the "smart" networks that we all fear will take away our freedom on the net. They plan on introducing tons of net-based services, like a digital valet. An AI which lives in the network and has inputs at your office, home and car and is controlled via a little PDA you carry around. This AI can feed you video streams from your house if someone comes to the door and can do other things like turn on and off your alarm system to let them in to deliver something. This AI can do much, much more than that too. All of it at the expense of anonymity of course.
Microsoft is coming up on a decade of interaction with users and usability testing. I think they're nearing the point that Apple did with OS 9, before they broke all the interfaces for the 'Aqua' look that pervades 0S 10.
In other words, despite all the FUD, marketing, and anti-competitive crap BillCo is engaged in, they're getting their User Interface pretty-damn near perfect in terms of usability
Either that or they've had ten years to sufficiently train most of the computer-using populace to their style of UI. A company who has developed the "perfect" product in response to consumer demand is almost indistinguishable from a monopoly which has forced their product on enough people to get them all familiar with it to the point of easy usability.
Trouble is, people are overloading the Internet with services that really want QoS. Now a decade ago, the telecom industry was foreseeing a way of doing that using Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM), a protocol that offers selectable QoS. But the Internet got commercialized and caught on instead. ATM became relegated to a niche technology (it's most widely used inside ADSL networks) but the global ATM network that had been foreseen never happened.
This isn't really relevant to the discussion, but I thought you'd like to know. There is a company working to develop an extensive ATM network, and it's one of the big ones, Sprint. Sprint is merging IP and ATM technology in it's backbone as they move from circuit switched to packet switched. They tried VoIP but the QoS problems were too much to handle, so they're moving to voice over ATM. Sprint's network will be a hybrid of "best effort" and ATM for it's high QoS needs. A neat effort and I hope they can pull it off.
Even the days of bypassing lame filters using Babelfish are numbered. The filter my company uses already blocks Babelfish. I may already have been reported to corporate security who will review this data to see if action is required! (the corporate security guys and I have good laughs over that message when we get together, but it keeps most people off pr0n at work)
Steven
Re:Didn't anyone read the article?
on
Bionic Nurses
·
· Score: 1
Those are valid points. It is my expectation that these devices will be self powered, once it comes to actual production models, or have a power plug that a nurse can plug in when she enters the room. I would also assume there was a way to cut off the suit in situations where a boost of strength may be harmful. A simple pushbutton on the end of the support struts would suffice.
You have a good point about the comfort level and the reassuring presence of a nurse. I'm not sure how intrusive these devices will be, but I'm sure they'll do their utmost to avoid making nurses look like cyborgs.
I haven't gotten ANY documents as a result of the sircam worm. I did get a really cool email from a chic named "Wendi" though. Aparently she found my email address in her outbox on something she had sent me earlier(she lost my emails you see). She told me she got a webcam and took some pics of herself and posted them on her website. I just have to be sure not to tell Todd about these pics. It feels so naughty somehow:) Here is the email
Hello this is Wendi!
I Lost your e-mails boy i am glad i found the address in my outbox!!
i just went out and bought a webcam and snapped a few pics of me and posted them here http://wendi3487.devil.ru
be sure to check them out and let me know how you like them!
DO NOT TELL TODD!!!!
He would get really pissed at me for showing anyone these pics. He thinks I took them for him..:)
http://wendi3487.devil.ru
love ya!
Wendi
xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo
Now I'm searching my outbox looking for emails for her address, she sounds hot! This Todd fellow kind of scares me though, if he's like the other guys I know from.ru he could probably kick my pasty white arse.
Slashdot Mirror
I think there are benefits to an event like this(I wish it didn't involve disasters of course) but if you look at cnn and their current home page you will see that they did a MAJOR site re-design to get their page to serve easily over their available bandwidth(which is apparently much too small for their regular pages in a case of emergency). For those who still can't get it to load, it is one .jpg about two inches high and three inches wide and about ten or twelve bullet points.
This is a change for the better in my opinion, the news sources have themselves to blame for their high-bandwidth sites which obviously can't cut the mustard when the heat is on.
Steven
Oh I have no doubt that the media isn't defective. It is damaged. Different thing, and I know that somehow, in my house with three small children, we damaged it. But, the point is, if I am not buying something that is bound to the media, if I am buying the right to use a copy of the software, does it matter which copy I use? If I bought that right, then I should be able to download an ISO image and burn a new copy if I need to, or get a new copy from a store. Whereas with music CDs and books you buy a physical copy, not a license. You have more rights to a physical copy than you do to a license. They have to choose which distribution scheme they will use. Licence it and replace unusable media(regardless of cause) or tie it to the media we bought and we can do whatever the hell we like with it(except copy it and distribute it).
Steven
See, this is even funnier. I was setting up a little webcam that my DSL company gave me when I ordered my service and I needed to install some more software from my Windows CDROM. I put the CDROM in the drive and it BSODed on me. It seems the CDROM was scratched or dirty. So I clean it up, but it is scratched, and try again. BSOD. More cleaning. BSOD. Maybe my other CDROM drive? BSOD.
Hmm. Wonder what would happen if I took that back to MS and said "It's busted." And get this, I DID buy a license to use that software which supposedly IS NOT tied to the physical disk. Seems that companies are picking whichever they feel is more convenient for them. License so they can say you can't have access to the media however you want, or media-bound when something goes wrong and you have to buy another copy.
Steven
I just had to reply to this seeing as I'm experiencing many of those frustrations at work myself at the moment. Here is a quick summary of the genesis of the project. The big boss(my boss's boss) said he wants a way to look at any of our testing environments and be able to tell what release version of all the different apps we're using as well as all the third-party software we're using. Add in a way to track all the costs of those products and the people responsible for vendor relations. Then throw in fields and links to the different management pieces of this(what release each environment is housing and who is the release manager) and the hardware each environment consists of(server name, IP, admin, etc). All in all a fairly complex database for a project with no funding. Oh, and a web-based front end with security access control and various levels of update/viewing access. Myself and a co-worker worked, on our own time mostly, to put together a database model and implement a mock-up database in Access to get proof of concept so maybe we could get money to do it right with Oracle and Java(the corporate standards, don't rail on me for these choices).
Project managers would see the balsa mockup and tell the construction crews to just put the mockup in place because it's good enough to use as is.
The Access database is now being populated with real data. Given Access's pitiful relationship modeling abilities(Access '97 no less) many of the queries we had designed to make this useful if it had a full-featured database are un-implementable. But it exists and people are starting to use it. Kinda. This brings me to your second point.
Somebody would stop the project halfway through construction to insist that it be changed from a simple truss to a suspension bridge.
After designing the data model and having a couple of meetings with various team leads to assure it met their needs and that everything they needed tracked would be tracked and all the relationships as defined jived with reality, the project was shelved for a little while. When a licensing mandate came down from high up, we scrambled to find our licenses for all our software and accurately report what we were and weren't using and their costs. Several people pulled all-niters and weekenders to gather this data and put it into various spreadsheets and notes with vastly different formats than what we had designed the database to accomodate, after all the project had been semi-shelved right? Now the big boss wants this data put into the database. I train a few people in our oncall group(who is here 24/7 and whom the task of data entry had been given) on how the database works and how to correlate the spreadsheet data into the actual database fields. They start keying data and assure me everything is fine and they'll call if they have any questions. A little while later I'm checking on them and I find out that another manager has come in(not my boss, but one of her peers, both report to the same big boss) and told them that she can't understand how the database works, and that she wants everything to look like the spreadsheets. So the oncall group, unknown to me, stops inputting data into the database my co-worker and I designed, and builds a new one, drastically different from the old one with no capabilities to track anything more than very basic info about third party apps.
Somebody else would stop the project to insist that it be changed from a suspension bridge to a tunnel, and furthermore, to demand delivery of a tunnel for simple truss prices.
We recently had a re-org where another group, with even more environments was brought in. Of course they were told by the big boss that they would need to get their info into our database. So I had a couple converstations with their management and they sent me TONS of reports on the configurations of their servers and their software.(I guess now is a good time to mention that this is a fortune 100 company and that we're dealing with 15 environments each containing dozens of enterprise class servers in different datacenters as well as several mainframes. The hardware budget for my department alone, not counting this new group, is over 60 Million each year. Yes, we own several E10,000 servers. Oh and we also support various training regions in the classrooms where they train reps. About seven or eight hundred desktops of various ages and equipment configurations in each region.) Yep, desktop, midrange, mainframe. So now we've gone from tracking our group, to tracking a tiny subset of our group, to tracking our group and a huge amount of data in another group. Grr.
Massive traffic jams would occur as users stop at each end and call for help because they can't figure out how to drive across.
Oh, did I mention that I have emails from several supervisors wanting to know how to access this information and that I've suddenly become the keeper of the Access Licenses? And I no longer even recognize the database they're trying to get access to?
Architects would be sent out to tow cars and fill potholes.
Oh, did I mention that they have sent all this data to ME, even though I've specifically mentioned that I'm not responsible for data entry and given them contact information for the people who are? Oh, and they're expecting status updates.
Grr.
Steven
The communications system that glues the Internet together was designed for no more than 4.3 billion computers and devices -- thought to be plenty 20 years ago. Half the connection points have already been assigned, and the life span for the remainder is estimated at five years. At that point, a "No Vacancy" sign may have to go up.
First the Y2K bug, now the IPv4 debacle. You're making technology look bad! How will you ever get widespread acceptance if people think you don't think far enough ahead to have your infrastructure scale?
Seriously, I think this is going to grow into something like the Y2K thing. Sure people won't be stockpiling on water and food like a few people I know did, but the reporting of this limitation could cause the public to think "Well, if I get involved in this thing, it'll just max out and then I'll be stuck with a useless 3G phone, or whatever."
Hell, my company is already taking IP addresses away from our servers and workstations and putting us on NAT because they need those IP address spaces for customers. This is a serious problem for the growth and mainstream acceptance of a wired world.
Steven
One of the best things about having the +1 bonus is the ability to come in late, about a week late, to a conversation and still get your comments archived. Now weather someone ever reads the Slashdot archives is another matter entirely. So this may have been completely useless, but hopefully someone will read it.
Your analogy of multitasking in a computer and the shifting of menial tasks in everyday activities into the subconscious is kind of off base. There are significant differences between the way computers multitask and the way biological organisms multitask. In a word, it's called evolution.
Think about it this way, the tasks are still getting loaded, and it's every bit as much info that has to be loaded into memory as it ever was. BUT! The hardware has been optimized in the interium. The real analogy would be a computer that has it's hardware re-designed to incorporate the logic needed to handle those menial tasks so it doesn't have to loaded into general purpose memory and have generic logic handle it. When a task of that type comes down it's routed to the special purpose hardware and is processed much faster so it can take the next input that much faster. Learned tasks have the appearance of being easier to multitask, but it's because the hardware is continually being optimized. Moving away from a general purpose machine into a large array of specialized machines with a smart distributor to spread the tasks around may be really efficient, but it's really bad for flexibility.
Now that we've gotten the human/machine multitasking analogies straightened out, I agree with the article in that multitasking in humans is difficult when none of those tasks are related or something that is done on a regular basis.
Steven
Treating each node as a peer! Don't they know that Peer to Peer networks are stealing from our musicians and corrupting our youth! I just hope they can repent before the heavy hand of justice comse down on them.
Steven
The funniest thing about your comment won't be understood by most people. Most people probably don't know who BilldaCat is. Some of us remember.
And even fewer of us probably remember, and still celebrate, "Chad is Bad" day.
Steven
Now if you've ever seen what medical students have to learn, it involves huge amounts of memorization and studying upwards of 12-18 hours per day (including classes) much of the time. Obviously unless you are some freak of nature you cannot concentrate effectively for that long. (yes this includes programmers too...)
;)
Luckily most good programmers are freaks of nature.
Steven
That's a very interesting idea. I've always loved the older generation and my grandmother(the only grandparent I ever knew) was very dear to me. As such I can attest to the ability of the older people to get online and how much they enjoy it. Hell, I'm a 20 something and just got DSL. My mom is 60(I was born fairly late in life) has had hers for almost a year now and before that had a dedicated phone line for dial-up. She's using the net for completely different things than I am, primarially family trees and tracing genealogy, but we're both avid net users. The older generation is a precious resource for the younger ones. I wouldn't be half as mature as I am if I hadn't had constant interaction with older people while I was growing up.(my mother was born when my grandmother was thirtysomething and I was born when my mother was 35 so there is over a 70 year age difference between my grandmother and I. Larger than most age differences.) Learning to bridge the generation gap is beneficial for both edges of the ravine.
Steven
That's true. For those of you who don't understand the comment, here is the deal. First Saturday takes a fair amount of real estate when all the vendors are there. Some of the parking lot owners rent their spaces and they charge some cash to set up in the premium spots right off the road. Some of the little guys, including me when I go down there to sell, set up in smaller lots off the main road and hope people wander by. One of the prime spots for used/personal stuff, the part that would be most like a swap instead of a sidewalk sale held by commercial entities, was under the bridge for the highway. This is a no-parking zone and the city started forcing the little guys selling out of their minvans and trucks out. A lot of the real obscure/vintage stuff went away when that happened.
That having been said, I think the last of it's glory is still head and shoulders above Fry's in both selection and quality of service, even if they weren't a fraction of Fry's prices. I have never bought a computer(or any major components) retail and as long as I live within driving distance of First Saturday, I never plan to.
Steven
Hey now! Some of my best friends look like the Unibomber! :) (but seriously, they do. They're Linux wizards too)
The closest Fry's is about 45 minutes away from me. I only go there when I'm buying something you can't get without going retail, like Lego Mindstorms, and then I make sure I inspect it closely before I buy it. I never buy anything there if I can avoid it, but they have a good selection. Just be sure you buy quality because returns are a sonofabitch. Hell I could stand in line with hundreds of dollars worth of merchandise and they'd gleefully ignore me for over half an hour. Fry's simply isn't worth the headache. Convenience on the initial purchase isn't worth the shitty service and high prices.
I haven't been to Fry's in about six months(since my last Mindstorms purchasing binge). I miss Fry's like I miss hemmoriods.
Steven
So you take a trip to Fry's to laugh hysterically at price tags?
Frankly I can see no other reason for going to Fry's at all.
I was exaggerating a bit, I've never been actually tossed out, but I have gotten funny looks over the silly grin I wear on my face looking at the same hardware I just bought for over twice the price.
Steven
LOL, that brought back some memories. I've been to First Saturday many times. One of the first times I ever went was with my brother and we got down there around 3AM. Having gone to school in downtown Dallas when I was in High School I didn't really feel that nervous, but with all this high-end hardware walking around and the poor lighting in the back-alley parking lots they press into service for the customers(the main ones are being used for the vendors tents) I figured there might be muggings. I mentioned this to my brother who then cracked me up with a quote that I have repeated to everyone I have ever told about First Saturday and I which I will repeat here.
"First Saturday is the safest you will ever be on the streets of downtown Dallas at 3AM. Look around, wall to wall nerds."
Steven
As a resident of the D/FW area and a regular at First Saturday I can attest to it's coolness on a first hand basis. It's been called "The largest open-air electronics sidewalk sale on the planet" and has had writeups in everything from local newspapers to the Wall Street Journal. Here's the scoop. On Friday night the vendors start to roll in, they sell all night and are gone by noon the next day. Mostly these are people who own computer shops throught the metroplex, but we get some of the larger vendors from further away too. Everyone pitches tents, sets up generators, cash registers, etc and sets tons, I mean TONS, of OEM and retail hardware on conference tables in the middle of a parking lot just west of the freeway. The prices are really amazing too. Every time I go to First Saturday I make it a point to go to Fry's the next day and browse for exactly the items I just bought off the street the night before. I've been stopped several times by people asking why I was laughing, and one time escorted from the store for laughing too hard at their prices. I've never paid more than half of what Fry's was asking for anything. Memory, motherboards, CPUs, CD burners, ANYTHING. Same brand names, same models, everything. I've never paid retail for any piece of hardware I've bought in any situation other than impulse buying. I've built three systems from parts purchased at First Saturday in the past four years and I intend to do it again as my current machine is over two years old. Cost me about 1200 bucks for the parts to build it at the time, and is just now starting to get a little behind the times. Think extreme bleeding edge two years ago for less than 1200 bucks.
I've introduced people in the office to First Saturday. The last time my co-workers went they all came back with factory refurbished 21" Sony Trinitron monitors for $325 the first time and the next month the price was $275. They got business cards and three year warranties from the companies. One of them had problems with it, took it back to the shop and they gave him another. They have 15" flat-panel HP monitors with integrated sound for about $300. I got my 120 watt, powered, shielded speakers for my workstation at the office for $6. That's not a typo. Six dollars. They sound good too.
I've also sold items there. My brother was a SA for a company who did a bunch of upgrades a while back and we hauled all the old desktop hardware out there and sold it out of the back of the company van. Good stuff, could have made some nice little BSD boxes, dirt cheap. Mix and match all the stuff you want. You want extra memory? Five bucks a stick for the simms you need.
That having been said, I am kind of disappointed with First Saturday recently. It's been going on for 30+ years now and originally you could get anything, I mean anything, electronic there. From single resistors to full computer sets. I saw military codebooks and collections of Magic cards there too. Now it's shifting from component-oriented to package oriented. They'll sell you bare-bones systems for $575 for a nice MB and Athlon based system, but without any of the toys like a DVD-ROM(bought mine there about a year ago for $85 for a 6X, damn fine price, and a major brand name too) You can still buy the component level stuff, but it's not the emphasis anymore. I guess it's just the world that has changed. The resistor is no longer a component, the board is a component. Sigh, I'm showing my age apparently.
Steven
speed reading is outlawed. Think about it, buy ten hours worth of reading, finish it in two hours, loan it to a friend who is also a speed reader, they finish in two hours, repeat. Five people who read the book for the price of one! That's four cases of piracy! Four lost sales! This travesty cannot be allowed.
Seriously though, this is still dumb. It will continue to take the goods away from the people who paid good money for them. I would doubt the legality of these lisencing schemes.
Steven
that it'll be taken seriously not because I do it on intelligently or on the net, but because I'm 15? In that case Katz prepare to have your arse roasted by a 15 year old technophile with mom and dad's Compaq at his fingertips!
Steven
Beware all ye who would criticize the genius of Lucas, for is it not written in the revised, updated and George (dubya) Bush approved version of The Constitution of the United States of the Multinational Corporations (now available as an Adobe(R)(TM)(C)All Rights Reserved E-book for $19.99 per view, order today! Operators are standing by!) In article I section 1 that George Lucas is hereby declared the greatest storyteller of all time and all law abiding and Bill Gates fearing citizens are required to pay homage to him by seeing any and all movies with the name Star Wars multiple times and by further paying homage by standing in ridiculously long lines at the local Wal-Mart to purchase dozens of non-biodegradable plastic toys for the betterment of our young(isn't it grand of us to think of the children?).
Yea and those who dare not to venerate the name of Lucas and pay the required homage shall be stricken from the rolls of the nation. They will be outcasts in their own land of birth. Denied bland conversation with their fellow citizens about the masterworks of Lucas, they will wallow in their anguish. They shall be stricken from the lists of people to be protected in time of war and their names will be added to the lists of those who will not recieve the bounty of this great land in the form of Blue Light specials and the occasional Buy one Get one FREE sales at the local Piggly Wiggly. They shall be stricken from the rolls of every good and beneficient policy this great conglomerate bestows upon it's consumers. Moreover their name shall be dupliated in all databases related to taxation and if they ever contest this clause, they are subject to auditing by the BSA, RIAA, MPAA and Rectal-Probers-R-Us.
So let it be written(in tiny print behind an encryption scheme which may not be broken under article two of this constitution, formerly known as the DMCA) so let it be done.
Now if you missed this update to the supreme law of our land, that isn't my fault. I suggest you rush right out to your computer and fully enable all the update packages you can and register any and all software you have. I got this preview of our new constitution as a bonus when I downloaded the latest version of Minsweeper, the official game of the land. Baseball isn't bringing in enough money it seems.
Steven
Finally a reason NOT to patch my linux box. Come on, somebody write one of these, please? And if anybody asks, I just say "What patch?" *Maniacal laughter*
Steven
ION has been released for both commercial and residential services, but only in about ten or twelve cities, and only in the US. It has moved very slowly, due to both last-mile problems(the frustration over this is the main impetus behind the wireless broadband campaign Sprint started) and pricing/business problems. When ION was started, it was a major pain to set up a customer(taking a month or more and relying on things like faxes between different business units and groups for exchanging information to set everything up). This manual process was error-prone and a major pain in the butt. Beyond that, they originally used VoIP instead of VoATM, so the voice quality sucked and the initial reviews were pretty harsh. After this arrow in the back, they switched to VoATM and implemented tons of automation in the back end to speed the delivery process and make it less of a pain/error prone. Currently ION services, all the communiation/automation pieces for setting up a customer is at v3.5b and is getting better all the time. It now takes a couple days from order to live instead of a month or so, from a technical standpoint, billing is what takes time in reality.
The scary part about all this? It looks like Sprint is helping build the "smart" networks that we all fear will take away our freedom on the net. They plan on introducing tons of net-based services, like a digital valet. An AI which lives in the network and has inputs at your office, home and car and is controlled via a little PDA you carry around. This AI can feed you video streams from your house if someone comes to the door and can do other things like turn on and off your alarm system to let them in to deliver something. This AI can do much, much more than that too. All of it at the expense of anonymity of course.
Steven
Microsoft is coming up on a decade of interaction with users and usability testing. I think they're nearing the point that Apple did with OS 9, before they broke all the interfaces for the 'Aqua' look that pervades 0S 10.
In other words, despite all the FUD, marketing, and anti-competitive crap BillCo is engaged in, they're getting their User Interface pretty-damn near perfect in terms of usability
Either that or they've had ten years to sufficiently train most of the computer-using populace to their style of UI. A company who has developed the "perfect" product in response to consumer demand is almost indistinguishable from a monopoly which has forced their product on enough people to get them all familiar with it to the point of easy usability.
Steven
Trouble is, people are overloading the Internet with services that really want QoS. Now a decade ago, the telecom industry was foreseeing a way of doing that using Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM), a protocol that offers selectable QoS. But the Internet got commercialized and caught on instead. ATM became relegated to a niche technology (it's most widely used inside ADSL networks) but the global ATM network that had been foreseen never happened.
This isn't really relevant to the discussion, but I thought you'd like to know. There is a company working to develop an extensive ATM network, and it's one of the big ones, Sprint. Sprint is merging IP and ATM technology in it's backbone as they move from circuit switched to packet switched. They tried VoIP but the QoS problems were too much to handle, so they're moving to voice over ATM. Sprint's network will be a hybrid of "best effort" and ATM for it's high QoS needs. A neat effort and I hope they can pull it off.
Steven
Even the days of bypassing lame filters using Babelfish are numbered. The filter my company uses already blocks Babelfish. I may already have been reported to corporate security who will review this data to see if action is required! (the corporate security guys and I have good laughs over that message when we get together, but it keeps most people off pr0n at work)
Steven
Those are valid points. It is my expectation that these devices will be self powered, once it comes to actual production models, or have a power plug that a nurse can plug in when she enters the room. I would also assume there was a way to cut off the suit in situations where a boost of strength may be harmful. A simple pushbutton on the end of the support struts would suffice.
You have a good point about the comfort level and the reassuring presence of a nurse. I'm not sure how intrusive these devices will be, but I'm sure they'll do their utmost to avoid making nurses look like cyborgs.
Steven
Now I'm searching my outbox looking for emails for her address, she sounds hot! This Todd fellow kind of scares me though, if he's like the other guys I know from
Steven