The answer to this is let someone else manage long term decisions where the stock brokers wont punish them brutally. A cloud takes care of long term planing for you. Yes, we all hate losing our jobs and it is a threat no doubt, but that is one of the benefits. A company no longer has to even worry about technology. Just log in and do their work and the cloud will upgrade automatically as long as you pay the monthly fee.
I happen to agree with blocking RPC. I remember the days of Windows XP SP 1 and SP 2, where if you did not have a hardware firewall you could be infected by doing a WinXP installation before the installation EVEN COMPLETES. Oh you need to disable your firewall to install SP 2? 25 seconds later BAM... infected.
I agree with pc's replacing mainframes. A single cpu with the power of a 286/386 can not handle 1,000 workers doing financial analysis, inventory management, word processing, and database on the big mainframe. Hell, we are just now being able to do that with 32 cpu systems with 32 GBs of ram.
Restrictions and lockdowns save money. People can do most of their jobs and clouds are really nice as the service provider does the bulk.
It is not short sightedness, but a reality of problems that exist with technology on a large scale. If pcs were not locked down, RPCs getting pwned, and mainframes bogged down everyone, then money would go up very fast as productivity goes down.
I think clouds are good for business, but for us personally in I.T. and it is a conflict of interest. I do feel that pcs are turning into dumb terminals all over again as these clouds and servers are the new mainframes, but with cool graphics and now with social websites.
But they did invent the pc and even trademarked the name. If it were not for IBM the computer revolution would have happened a decade later. Apple was a name of a fruit that didnt sound professional. IBM had clout
If you run Windows I highly suggest you try IE 9. It is catching up and is very html 5 compliant. Still webkit owns it for now with all the features. IE 10 will hopefully bring this to a close.
As much as many of us at this website delore IE, it is nice to get users to ugprade so we all can enjoy HTML 5. As long as IE 8 and earlier keep being used as the most popular browsers in the world, you can bet webmasters will ignore us and only focus on html 4 and CSS 1.x.... if only WindowsXP could be retired sooner. Sigh
No one is taking JavaFX seriously. Add to security holes of JRE and now true hardware acceleration of html 5 in IE 9 and Firefox and it is dead.
Java applets were depreciated in HTML 3 thanks to Microsoft. They did a great job killing it and lobbying/bribing w3c members to depreciate it. This scared web developers enough to switch to Flash when they saw that.... not that I am not still mad at them 12 years later.
What irrates me the most is the only way to create JavaFX applets is to use Adobe tools??? Netbeans does not have any gui features and that is a must for visual development. If you already have Adobe Fireworks then why not just write it for flash, after all you paid for it? Doh
HTML 5 with ajax will be what JavaFX is with IE 9/10, Firefox 5, and Chrome 13 with hardware acceleration. Javascript is getting much faster too and I would not be suprised to see a java like JVM that runs javascript as the same speed as Java. With newer browsers you can do wonders and windows 8 is going to show that off.
Come on. The earth's atmosphere is different than it was 50 million users ago when it was much more tropical and wetter. It is thinner and it will never return to the past so lets not kid ourselves and call this an ice age because it will never end until the sun starts expanding and swallows up the Earth. Today, a terradactyl can not even fly in today's atmosphere.
This is not an ice age with an end, but more like a new permanent period regardless of what your college textbooks say. Rainforests are not coming back to Iowa anytime soon. Glacial periods seem more like ages that come and go with the times. There is debate about changing college material and calling more glacial periods ice ages for this reason. Just like a poorly mis prounced word, term, or incorrect spelling becomes part of the english language over time because it is common, an Ice Age is a reference to the glacial periods to the common person.
Why do you think America has been going bankrupt trying to keep up with the Jones next door.
Or walk into a casino? When someone wins large lights and very loud sounds are made while the machine dispatches the cash slowly all for everyone to see that someone else made money.
I had issues with WebGL on Windows with a recent ATi 5750. I do admit in Chrome they run better but at slower FPS than Firefox 4. Either way, this is not something should happen under Windows with official ATI drivers. Nvidia cards are on Firefox's blacklist as well so it is not just one vendor with poor quality drivers.
Microsoft supports CSS 3D instead. Seriously Microsoft is right about security flaws in OpenCL and WebGL as skeptical as I am.
I read stories here on slashdot with computer scientist publishing articles saying how bad OpenCL is from a security stand point. No user priveldges at all in using the GPU.
If only drivers did not contain scripts, trusted, and untrusted code in a demonic bastion could we trust them. Check this out, when a null hits a texture load api? A simple Javascript could root the system easily using webGL and read your ram just like that example above printed out the contents of the users VRam as a texture.
Another example of hardware acceleration with security gone wrong is flash. It seems the new flaws of security are graphics related. We need a new graphics API, frankly Intel, Nvidia, and ATI have shitty and horrible drivers no matter what the platform is. Even my ATI 5750 can not render the stupid aquarium right with Firefox 4 in Windows 7. I admit I am not a hardware expert but it seems the driver model in itself is flawed.
Oddly a cloud is the new mainframe, a centralized system managed where client's web browser is the dumb terminal. Everything is managed so you can focus on your business goals and not I.T.
If anything I think the cycle is returning to the early 1980s. I think mainframes were not that bad actually for big companies with thousands of workers. Things are about to get interesting, but I see the trend is in reverse.
Also in the late 1980s was a popular business philosphy that I.T. were just cost centers and technology was simply commodities. Go cheap! Sound familiar? After the 1987 crash and the introduction of file servers and Windows the trend reversed. To me time is going backwards with this.
You underestimate the cost savings from firing your I.T. department and getting rid of all your servers. You could save millions and use that for more T3 lines out. Yes, Saas probably could do things faster as it is there job and they have the employees to do just that.
Well, it all boils down to your employer's goals. If they make anything non I.T. related then yes it is how high. You are a waste of shareholder money and just there to be keep things from breaking. Not actually providing value at all to the company. You are a plumber and a technician and nothing more.
if you think you are better than get into sales or management as they are what is truly important. Or join an I.T. company where they actually make money from what you do.
The outsourcing crowd you talk about is just as active as ever and Clouds are the next progression. Now we can finally focus on our customers are let a website take care of our needs instead. These are answers you may not want to hear but it is the truth. It is insulting and I agree, but these other guys are correct. Technology is a commodity like electricity or plumbing. It is very important, but you never need to focus on it. Just pay by the month and do something else to increase sales. Each department has goals to help the company out and honest I see no value in I.T. other than repairing computers. 3rd party vendors and websites can help with certain customized needs you can't get with Office.
The problem is game theory in that people's number one goal is to keep their job. Not just from I.T. but from publically traded companies as well. Those who have great selling skills,,, read sales and marketing departments never get the axe when trimming costs for these reasons.
I do not think I.T. departments are inept but I would be having sweat come down my head if I read proposals for salesforce.com or Saas come by my desk and assume my job would be on the line. Of course I would oppose you.
In business school the biggest case of outsourcing (cloud included) is that they are not in the I.T. business. They are in the (insert banking, finance, construction, etc) business. Should a major bank with no knowledge of food preperation have it's own cafeteria or should they outsource to someone who does just that?
So why pay 3x for underpaid grunts who are not aliagned with values of the company, when you can go to salesforce.com or cloudx and have them take care of it for you for 1/3 the cost!!
I know it is something you all hate to read, but I speak the truth. Management never liked I.T. with the exception if you are an I.T. company. You cost money and produce no business value unlike the good old boys of management.
This means it is time for us to look for other careers path's if I sound too cynical. Our employers only concern is money and of a cloud can do it cheaper and they do not have to ever deal with you then it makes sense for them to fire you and replace you with a website. Nothing personal, it is just business and why should Joe's ceiling tiles inc have to worry about cost center computer guys? They do not make tiles or sell them?
Fuck XP. Its very very old. I am sick and tired of technology being viewed as cost centers and commodities from brainless accountants who do not see tco savings and other ROI from modern platforms.
In thr late 1980s same principle happened and it caused a pickle when Windows and file servers came out. Corporations had to throw out there value equipment and dumb terminals all because they wanted to boadt their share price earlier.
These same companies will refuse to buy kinect biz apps anyway. Just use Windows 7 folks. It is almost 2 years old.
A new meat substitute to finally end the controversy of using corn meal, sand, and cow brains and intensives dyed with carmal to make it look like real ground beef.
Or Walmart will jump on it and sell it for DIRT CHEAP and of course people who are frugal will jump on it. LOL
Go look at the want ads? They all advertise Dreamweaver experience as part of the minimum requirement for the jobs where I live in Alaska. I do not like it, but netbeans does not offer a CSS layout preview. Aptana I mentioned is a an Eclipse addon and it has no gui tools too.
Many developers use Dreamweaver because they are Adobe photoshop and Live shops and it is part of Adobe's ecosystem so it comes with the expensive bundle so it is what the graphical design teams use. I find it frustrating, but more gui and graphical oriented professionals prefer it.
Are the latest Java JRE really that insecure? Java has prided itself as having the ultimate sandbox and I know finally someone compromised it last year.
Reason I am asking is because I use Eclipse and do Android development. Is it save to use the latest releases of Java 6 64 bit?
Great maybe my Andriod phone will get an update oh after it has been rooted by 2012. AT&T is refusing to update it, probably because they want me to buy a new phone.
Apple does not have corporate users who hate to upgrade unless things are tested first... whichever year they decide to do it. It is a liability because it is called Windows Update and therefore is part of Windows according to the lawyers. Not to mention Sarbines Oxley requires documentation for unathorized software upgrades or installs and useless annoying crap.
With the Apple Store the user assumes responsibility. No such arrangement on Windows as Offices would refuse to use it otherwise.
"YouTube content is generally usable with the HTML5 video tag, which pretty much eliminated the one site I regularly use that required Flash. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that 99% of the Flash content I encounter is advertising, and sites generally work correctly if the Flash content doesn't load, so I see no reason not to disable Flash. "
The issue is IE 6/7. Since Asian and corporate users refuse to upgrade the webmasters are under pressure to make a site that looks great for IE 6 that will work 5 years from now with Chrome 25. Flash is the substitute. I really hope when XP finally dies that corporations will upgrade to Windows 8 with IE 10 so developers can finally leave flash behind. There are sites too that use more flash if it detects IE 6 or IE 7.
"Scientific programmers, game and multimedia devs, crypto hackers. Uh oh."
The target market is for developers writting software for Windows 8 tablets and netbooks with AMD fusion Llano (and future cousins).
WIth IE HTML hardware and flash acceleration enalbed by default, a nice GPU will be needed for the gui eye candy and video effects if the cpu is not up to task. GPU speeds with OpenCL are very fast for a dinky integrated low end chip. An integrated ARM processors can use this too if and when they exist as many bash it as not being powerful enough to run Windows 8. AMP is a frameworkf or developers to take advantage of this easier.
AMD Fusion is SWEET! and of course is sponsoring this event. FYI, the bechmarks above are fully integrated lowest end model in the sub $400 notebook market. The fusion one listed in that link is a slow mobile version that is to compete with the intel ATOM. These units have a ATi 6800 style graphics, which can be much much faster with dual channel DDR ram and perhaps a seperate channel for its own ram? These low end bandwidth starved ones can run starcraft at 30 fps for $400 netbook and fully 1080P HD video. Future ones will compete agaisnt fully loaded $1000 systems with dedicated cards and it will have faster CPUs.
Also even if it is slow it has multiple cores (4) on the die so AMP will be quite nice as it can use the low power fusion efficiently too while offloading more tasks to the GPU inside it. Since that is integrated into the chip I can imagine it will be much faster for the CPU/GPU to talk to each other even though memory bandwidth is bad.
I think Intel has some real competition again as I would love to get one of these myself.
The CPU performance is not the best, but that will matter less if it is cheap and graphics are taken care of. How much CPU do you need to run Word?
If you are fairly competent in knowing html tags then an editor is trivial. However, knowing what your CSS will look like is a different matter.
I dislike Dreamweaver, but like Word it is the defacto standard since FrontPage isn't around anymore. Use that and Firebug and an editor of your choosing. I use Aptana with eclipse personally, but it is quite bloated.
Slashdot Mirror
The answer to this is let someone else manage long term decisions where the stock brokers wont punish them brutally. A cloud takes care of long term planing for you. Yes, we all hate losing our jobs and it is a threat no doubt, but that is one of the benefits. A company no longer has to even worry about technology. Just log in and do their work and the cloud will upgrade automatically as long as you pay the monthly fee.
I happen to agree with blocking RPC. I remember the days of Windows XP SP 1 and SP 2, where if you did not have a hardware firewall you could be infected by doing a WinXP installation before the installation EVEN COMPLETES. Oh you need to disable your firewall to install SP 2? 25 seconds later BAM ... infected.
I agree with pc's replacing mainframes. A single cpu with the power of a 286/386 can not handle 1,000 workers doing financial analysis, inventory management, word processing, and database on the big mainframe. Hell, we are just now being able to do that with 32 cpu systems with 32 GBs of ram.
Restrictions and lockdowns save money. People can do most of their jobs and clouds are really nice as the service provider does the bulk.
It is not short sightedness, but a reality of problems that exist with technology on a large scale. If pcs were not locked down, RPCs getting pwned, and mainframes bogged down everyone, then money would go up very fast as productivity goes down.
I think clouds are good for business, but for us personally in I.T. and it is a conflict of interest. I do feel that pcs are turning into dumb terminals all over again as these clouds and servers are the new mainframes, but with cool graphics and now with social websites.
But they did invent the pc and even trademarked the name. If it were not for IBM the computer revolution would have happened a decade later. Apple was a name of a fruit that didnt sound professional. IBM had clout
If you run Windows I highly suggest you try IE 9. It is catching up and is very html 5 compliant. Still webkit owns it for now with all the features. IE 10 will hopefully bring this to a close.
As much as many of us at this website delore IE, it is nice to get users to ugprade so we all can enjoy HTML 5. As long as IE 8 and earlier keep being used as the most popular browsers in the world, you can bet webmasters will ignore us and only focus on html 4 and CSS 1.x. ... if only WindowsXP could be retired sooner. Sigh
No one is taking JavaFX seriously. Add to security holes of JRE and now true hardware acceleration of html 5 in IE 9 and Firefox and it is dead.
Java applets were depreciated in HTML 3 thanks to Microsoft. They did a great job killing it and lobbying/bribing w3c members to depreciate it. This scared web developers enough to switch to Flash when they saw that. ... not that I am not still mad at them 12 years later.
What irrates me the most is the only way to create JavaFX applets is to use Adobe tools??? Netbeans does not have any gui features and that is a must for visual development. If you already have Adobe Fireworks then why not just write it for flash, after all you paid for it? Doh
HTML 5 with ajax will be what JavaFX is with IE 9/10, Firefox 5, and Chrome 13 with hardware acceleration. Javascript is getting much faster too and I would not be suprised to see a java like JVM that runs javascript as the same speed as Java. With newer browsers you can do wonders and windows 8 is going to show that off.
Yawn.
Come on. The earth's atmosphere is different than it was 50 million users ago when it was much more tropical and wetter. It is thinner and it will never return to the past so lets not kid ourselves and call this an ice age because it will never end until the sun starts expanding and swallows up the Earth. Today, a terradactyl can not even fly in today's atmosphere.
This is not an ice age with an end, but more like a new permanent period regardless of what your college textbooks say. Rainforests are not coming back to Iowa anytime soon. Glacial periods seem more like ages that come and go with the times. There is debate about changing college material and calling more glacial periods ice ages for this reason. Just like a poorly mis prounced word, term, or incorrect spelling becomes part of the english language over time because it is common, an Ice Age is a reference to the glacial periods to the common person.
Why do you think America has been going bankrupt trying to keep up with the Jones next door.
Or walk into a casino? When someone wins large lights and very loud sounds are made while the machine dispatches the cash slowly all for everyone to see that someone else made money.
I had issues with WebGL on Windows with a recent ATi 5750. I do admit in Chrome they run better but at slower FPS than Firefox 4. Either way, this is not something should happen under Windows with official ATI drivers. Nvidia cards are on Firefox's blacklist as well so it is not just one vendor with poor quality drivers.
Microsoft supports CSS 3D instead. Seriously Microsoft is right about security flaws in OpenCL and WebGL as skeptical as I am.
I read stories here on slashdot with computer scientist publishing articles saying how bad OpenCL is from a security stand point. No user priveldges at all in using the GPU.
If only drivers did not contain scripts, trusted, and untrusted code in a demonic bastion could we trust them. Check this out, when a null hits a texture load api? A simple Javascript could root the system easily using webGL and read your ram just like that example above printed out the contents of the users VRam as a texture.
Another example of hardware acceleration with security gone wrong is flash. It seems the new flaws of security are graphics related. We need a new graphics API, frankly Intel, Nvidia, and ATI have shitty and horrible drivers no matter what the platform is. Even my ATI 5750 can not render the stupid aquarium right with Firefox 4 in Windows 7. I admit I am not a hardware expert but it seems the driver model in itself is flawed.
Oddly a cloud is the new mainframe, a centralized system managed where client's web browser is the dumb terminal. Everything is managed so you can focus on your business goals and not I.T.
If anything I think the cycle is returning to the early 1980s. I think mainframes were not that bad actually for big companies with thousands of workers. Things are about to get interesting, but I see the trend is in reverse.
Also in the late 1980s was a popular business philosphy that I.T. were just cost centers and technology was simply commodities. Go cheap! Sound familiar? After the 1987 crash and the introduction of file servers and Windows the trend reversed. To me time is going backwards with this.
You underestimate the cost savings from firing your I.T. department and getting rid of all your servers. You could save millions and use that for more T3 lines out. Yes, Saas probably could do things faster as it is there job and they have the employees to do just that.
Well, it all boils down to your employer's goals. If they make anything non I.T. related then yes it is how high. You are a waste of shareholder money and just there to be keep things from breaking. Not actually providing value at all to the company. You are a plumber and a technician and nothing more.
if you think you are better than get into sales or management as they are what is truly important. Or join an I.T. company where they actually make money from what you do.
The outsourcing crowd you talk about is just as active as ever and Clouds are the next progression. Now we can finally focus on our customers are let a website take care of our needs instead. These are answers you may not want to hear but it is the truth. It is insulting and I agree, but these other guys are correct. Technology is a commodity like electricity or plumbing. It is very important, but you never need to focus on it. Just pay by the month and do something else to increase sales. Each department has goals to help the company out and honest I see no value in I.T. other than repairing computers. 3rd party vendors and websites can help with certain customized needs you can't get with Office.
That is great if you are writing virtual Vm drivers.
Saas is a major threat and a portal/cloudish.
The problem is game theory in that people's number one goal is to keep their job. Not just from I.T. but from publically traded companies as well. Those who have great selling skills ,,, read sales and marketing departments never get the axe when trimming costs for these reasons.
I do not think I.T. departments are inept but I would be having sweat come down my head if I read proposals for salesforce.com or Saas come by my desk and assume my job would be on the line. Of course I would oppose you.
In business school the biggest case of outsourcing (cloud included) is that they are not in the I.T. business. They are in the (insert banking, finance, construction, etc) business. Should a major bank with no knowledge of food preperation have it's own cafeteria or should they outsource to someone who does just that?
So why pay 3x for underpaid grunts who are not aliagned with values of the company, when you can go to salesforce.com or cloudx and have them take care of it for you for 1/3 the cost!!
I know it is something you all hate to read, but I speak the truth. Management never liked I.T. with the exception if you are an I.T. company. You cost money and produce no business value unlike the good old boys of management.
This means it is time for us to look for other careers path's if I sound too cynical. Our employers only concern is money and of a cloud can do it cheaper and they do not have to ever deal with you then it makes sense for them to fire you and replace you with a website. Nothing personal, it is just business and why should Joe's ceiling tiles inc have to worry about cost center computer guys? They do not make tiles or sell them?
Fuck XP. Its very very old. I am sick and tired of technology being viewed as cost centers and commodities from brainless accountants who do not see tco savings and other ROI from modern platforms.
In thr late 1980s same principle happened and it caused a pickle when Windows and file servers came out. Corporations had to throw out there value equipment and dumb terminals all because they wanted to boadt their share price earlier.
These same companies will refuse to buy kinect biz apps anyway. Just use Windows 7 folks. It is almost 2 years old.
A new meat substitute to finally end the controversy of using corn meal, sand, and cow brains and intensives dyed with carmal to make it look like real ground beef.
Or Walmart will jump on it and sell it for DIRT CHEAP and of course people who are frugal will jump on it. LOL
Shudder
Go look at the want ads? They all advertise Dreamweaver experience as part of the minimum requirement for the jobs where I live in Alaska. I do not like it, but netbeans does not offer a CSS layout preview. Aptana I mentioned is a an Eclipse addon and it has no gui tools too.
Many developers use Dreamweaver because they are Adobe photoshop and Live shops and it is part of Adobe's ecosystem so it comes with the expensive bundle so it is what the graphical design teams use. I find it frustrating, but more gui and graphical oriented professionals prefer it.
Are the latest Java JRE really that insecure? Java has prided itself as having the ultimate sandbox and I know finally someone compromised it last year.
Reason I am asking is because I use Eclipse and do Android development. Is it save to use the latest releases of Java 6 64 bit?
Same here. All the benchmarks show Chrome using many times more memory than Firefox. It is time this rumor died.
Great maybe my Andriod phone will get an update oh after it has been rooted by 2012. AT&T is refusing to update it, probably because they want me to buy a new phone.
"Apple does it just fine with the AppStore..."
Apple does not have corporate users who hate to upgrade unless things are tested first ... whichever year they decide to do it. It is a liability because it is called Windows Update and therefore is part of Windows according to the lawyers. Not to mention Sarbines Oxley requires documentation for unathorized software upgrades or installs and useless annoying crap.
With the Apple Store the user assumes responsibility. No such arrangement on Windows as Offices would refuse to use it otherwise.
"YouTube content is generally usable with the HTML5 video tag, which pretty much eliminated the one site I regularly use that required Flash. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that 99% of the Flash content I encounter is advertising, and sites generally work correctly if the Flash content doesn't load, so I see no reason not to disable Flash.
"
The issue is IE 6/7. Since Asian and corporate users refuse to upgrade the webmasters are under pressure to make a site that looks great for IE 6 that will work 5 years from now with Chrome 25. Flash is the substitute. I really hope when XP finally dies that corporations will upgrade to Windows 8 with IE 10 so developers can finally leave flash behind. There are sites too that use more flash if it detects IE 6 or IE 7.
"Scientific programmers, game and multimedia devs, crypto hackers. Uh oh."
The target market is for developers writting software for Windows 8 tablets and netbooks with AMD fusion Llano (and future cousins).
WIth IE HTML hardware and flash acceleration enalbed by default, a nice GPU will be needed for the gui eye candy and video effects if the cpu is not up to task. GPU speeds with OpenCL are very fast for a dinky integrated low end chip. An integrated ARM processors can use this too if and when they exist as many bash it as not being powerful enough to run Windows 8. AMP is a frameworkf or developers to take advantage of this easier.
AMD Fusion is SWEET! and of course is sponsoring this event. FYI, the bechmarks above are fully integrated lowest end model in the sub $400 notebook market. The fusion one listed in that link is a slow mobile version that is to compete with the intel ATOM. These units have a ATi 6800 style graphics, which can be much much faster with dual channel DDR ram and perhaps a seperate channel for its own ram? These low end bandwidth starved ones can run starcraft at 30 fps for $400 netbook and fully 1080P HD video. Future ones will compete agaisnt fully loaded $1000 systems with dedicated cards and it will have faster CPUs.
Also even if it is slow it has multiple cores (4) on the die so AMP will be quite nice as it can use the low power fusion efficiently too while offloading more tasks to the GPU inside it. Since that is integrated into the chip I can imagine it will be much faster for the CPU/GPU to talk to each other even though memory bandwidth is bad.
I think Intel has some real competition again as I would love to get one of these myself.
The CPU performance is not the best, but that will matter less if it is cheap and graphics are taken care of. How much CPU do you need to run Word?
If you are fairly competent in knowing html tags then an editor is trivial. However, knowing what your CSS will look like is a different matter.
I dislike Dreamweaver, but like Word it is the defacto standard since FrontPage isn't around anymore. Use that and Firebug and an editor of your choosing. I use Aptana with eclipse personally, but it is quite bloated.