there is this company in the bay area that I have used, while their prices are currently slightly higher than whats quoted in the article - its still a good service:
Question: I have fully switched to Ubuntu for one of my work laptops and all of my home systems. (I still have windows laptop at work for various reasons)
I effectively run default desktop 7.10 with Gnome. -- Can I easily swap between DEs? I actually have no idea of the diff between KED and Gnome (ill find an TFA) but how can I choose which to run at startup? (if this is possible)
grr... replied to wrong post.. this was meant to you:
SOX based IT Controls have a lot more to do with human discipline than simply electronic lock down.
Here is a story about unammed very large defense contractor I worked for:
(These guys have the most strict latop/desktop policies I have seen)
Their employees would go to a vendor in taiwan and they were only allowed to transfer information between certain systems at the TW vendor site and corporate machines via USB keys so that no networking was taking place (modern day sneaker net) as there were active atacks coming from unnamed asian power house.
Even though they were at a 3rd party vendor and USB keys was only transfer vector - the asian country had compromised the TW vendor systems and installed trojans that specifically targeted USB keys as they knew unnamed contractor laptops were passing data via this vector...
The point is; Being a lockout nazi on all systems does not give you that much more security. The best security is arrived through a balance of user behaviour education and reasoned thought out computer security and maintenance... The problem is that the correct way to do this takes a lot more resource than the lazy ways...
SOX based IT Controls have a lot more to do with human discipline than simply electronic lock down.
Here is a story about unammed very large defense contractor I worked for:
(These guys have the most strict latop/desktop policies I have seen)
Their employees would go to a vendor in taiwan and they were only allowed to transfer information between certain systems at the TW vendor site and corporate machines via USB keys so that no networking was taking place (modern day sneaker net) as there were active atacks coming from unnamed asian power house.
Even though they were at a 3rd party vendor and USB keys was only transfer vector - the asian country had compromised the TW vendor systems and installed trojans that specifically targeted USB keys as they knew unnamed contractor laptops were passing data via this vector...
The point is; Being a lockout nazi on all systems does not give you that much more security. The best security is arrived through a balance of user behaviour education and reasoned thought out computer security and maintenance... The problem is that the correct way to do this takes a lot more resource than the lazy ways...
I allow users to be a local admin or power user on their machine for two reasons:
Important for me:
1. We are STRICT about A/V and system updates.
Important for them: 2. Users often times (when given a laptop) start to use the laptop as their primary machine. They will use it to do their taxes, do all their online shopping/browsing/webmail etc. and use it for entertainment etc... It consumes too much of my departments time dealing with little complaints about apps like IM FTP webex etc...
The user should have some freedom over their day-to-day environment.
It is my job to ensure IT has done due-diligence with AV and filtering and *EDUCATION* on how to keep a machine clean for the users.
Yes this is the main problem with the concept of "embracing super users"
At several companies people outside IT have floated the idea that there should be a departmental super user who people within the department can go to with issues. The idea being that a highly technical member of their department would understand their specific departmental tasks/duties/needs and be able to support them on "little or common" it requests.
The reality is that this effectively makes that person a member of IT - and the sad fact is that typically they are not in a position to have proper access to all systems/passwords etc to solve issues.
Aside from specific application support, its generally not a good idea to rely on Super Users to work on general IT issues.
What really needs to be addressed is properly staffing helpdesks with the APPROPRIATE resource.
This starts getting at the core of the problem within IT - Costs...
99% of IT departments are not *embraced themselves* by execs - who only see a bottom line problem; IT departments spend money. Lots of it.
Funding the correct resource in a department can be hard for small to mid size companies because they dont think a helpdesk person should cost them anything north of 50K, but the reality is that a quality baseline of skills is required in helpdesk.
While I ahve exceptional people on my staff, often times they are underpaid given their skill set. I think a rockstar helpdesk person can be worth around 80K per year. But as their skills grow even furtehr they are likely to go and want to become sys ads and sr sys ads. These guys range between 80 and 110 / yr depending on specifics.
Companies think helpdesk should be a lowly intern or some 45-50K person...
This results in mediocre skills and more importantly -- MOTIVATION. Thus the hole of "IT departments unable to meet or understand..."
budgeting for STAFF in IT should be spread as a cost to all departments. Each department should carry an expense for a portion of funding the pay of IT. Just in the same way they (typically, if budgeting is done correctly) share the load in the cost of capital projects.
Full objects, made of "bound particles" (polygons that when constrained to eachother act as an object) but that whole object can be a particle?
Then if destroyed the resultant triagles themselves become particles?
I ask in that I would like to know if a whole seemingly static scene can really be generated/destroyed/interacted with as if everything were particles...
Or is this how things are already done??
It just seems to me that super-particles is how reality is built anyway....
What about using it as a departmental imaging server.
With a 160GB drive - put some images on the router - plug a machine into a VLAN and the machine could then boot off the network and be imaged with the system image for that department/VLAN.
It could be used for Caching and proxy services.
How about a web based chat channel. - jsut enter the IP of your default Gateway and you get a web based chat room. You can see all the other people on your subnet hanging from that device - and see its peers - you could then open channels to upstream routers as well - maybe the admins could control how many hops away you can see.
How about an integrated monitoring app. Go to the IP of the gateway and it will show you waht services it thinks your system is running (and the services of all the other machines directly attached) and you can configure monitoring and alerts for those services. Log in and tell it "this machine I am on is a web server - check this URL if you cant get to it email/SMS me"
I absolutely HATE the fact that there is no intrinsic bandwidth monitoring and reporting in many networking devices. I would want the machine to have integrated traffic reporting at every hub. (you know what I mean by hub). I should be able to look at all flows through a router/switch and see what/how much/who is doing what. And I shouldnt have to ahve some external app/license to do so.
The first days of UO back in 1997 were actually some of the most fun, as when UO came out - there wasnt really any precedent for any of the behavior that is now defacto MMORPG (as in with MUDS it was slightly less dynamic)
GMs invisibly following around PVP guilds (like ours) to learn how people interacted and gamed-the-game - these resulted in patches very rapidly, WOW has taken the best of its predecessors and expounded upon them in spades.
They have done a great job - I just wish i was 10+ years younger and could spend any time enjoying it...
A USB encryption device that looks like any other USB key - when plugged in and its running, all data is routed through it and encrypted. Both traffic intended for wired interfaces and wireless.
the traffic could be routed to any number of "open" community run proxies as the device could be setup to create a tunnel between you and that proxy.
---
In 2002 I wrote a short white paper on an idea to use NBAR/ deep packet inspection to allow for service based routing of traffic and advertising in public networks.
Basically the idea would be very loosly based on the principle behind JXTA - where a user who attaches to a wireless public mesh is connected with resources that are geographically closest to him (I hadnt thought of GPS as a part of the system for some reason) - but the idea would be that if you wanted to print you would simply "print" i.e. send your print job and the network would route the job to the closest printer. The idea was that the network would dynamically route based on the intent of the flow...
So on the one hand you want the network to be "the pipes are not aware of the water flowing throguh them" and on the other you want the network and computers to "just work" (menaing no configuration necessary)...
F.O.R.C.E. == Film Origination Realized [through] Computer Enhancement
(in all seriousness though - this is what the Presidio was designed for - was to facilitate extremely high collaboration between the groups developing digital media. I think that (someone) will be successful (moreso than now) with this, I can only hope though that as this tech matures the "plastic-ness" of the generated movies will dissapear (e.g. King Kong)
While I agree with your point - and I too have successfully boycotted (sp) Nike for as long as I can remember - I want to comment on the "between the lines" story here:
What's really interesting about this article is that we are seeing the Tip of the Iceberg in what could wind up being a powerhouse of technical services offered by Google.
Just like the Google hosting.
I had been predicting (to my self and a few friends only) what I was expecting to see from Google as the logical steps in their development:
Google hosting - what better way to index all the sites than if they are already hosted in your infrastructure Google mail - same case Technical services - as we now see with Nike - but I expect that this will become a larger offering.
I am not a Google fan-boy - but I have been watching their stride towards these types of steps with great interest - and have so far been successfully surmising what their next steps would be, along with most other people I assume - as it seems to be a fairly obvious progression...
But - the kicker here is the "don't be evil" statement. At some point Google will become that Microsoft or AT&T - public perception of them will be evil. Though it may just be out of shear jealousy over others' lack of resources to be able to pre-empt obvious next business steps - or even jealousy over not being a part of the development of this company.
Imagine 5 years from now - if Google is successful in their deployment of a private global network using their DC nodes and dark fiber they have been purchasing, what that will do to "Google specific QOS" - where their indexing traffic - or application traffic gets priority across those lines at specific times (or always) - it will, be amazing to see how a network like that will work and be managed.
The great thing I see though is how organically ideas are created here - but how quickly Google jumps on them. Though it does scare me a bit...
Wait to see if Google tech services begin to compete with IBM. (Not that it would be hard IBM tech services sucks - in my experience)
actually I us IM on my treo quite a bit - I use VeriChat which allows me to be online on Yahoo and AOL all the time... it was 25 bucks for a year - and i have found it to be a valuable tool. Though I avoid using it while driving.
Its a realtive statement I guess. There are tags from some of the smaller manufacturers that are trying to place more data in the tag - but according to some of our engineers you ahve to keep the data sizes small due to the speed and power to read them.
If you are taking hundreds of reads minute, then pulling 256K can prove to be a difficult matter, how many tags can you hear from a reader at one time? Lots.
Also, there is a problem with encryption and security. Most tags are not encrypted - nor are they locked to any reader - you ping it - it will respond. Some challenges are around getting the tags to only listen to *your* infrastructure.
Ill go talk to one of our lead engineers and get more specifics on this.
I have one of the most highly polished Tin-Foil-Hats around, but I am not terribly worried about RFID, not the commercially advertised incarnations anyway.
I work as the IT manager for the largest RFID company in the world. We are *the* supplier of RFID tags and devices to the DoD. With the tags and devices available from my company and others; Matrics, Alien etc.. you needent worry. These tags are too expensive, or also too big and too weak to be of concern to people. (Expensive being the primary gating item to ubiquity)
However - i would remind people that a cell phone is far more an unknown and exploitable device than the current commercially advertised and known RFID tags.
RFID is a phenomenon that has been known about for a long time. (as are cell phones which were first proofed in the 40s) and falls into two categories; Active or Passive. Active tags have a battery which powers the antennae - passive tags merely respond to RF waves that pass through them and "reply" with a unique signature.
Passive tags hold very little data, usually just an ID - or serial number (around 1K-ish - historically). Active tags have memory (256/512K ish) and can hold real data, such as the manifest of a shipping container.
The data still needs to be read and dealt with in a meaningful way. Passive IDs need to be correlated to a backend DB which equates the ID with some meaningful data, such as a record of what that ID actually represents.
Active tags are a bit more flexible in that they can provide info which does not necessarily require access to a backed DB in order to understand what the tag is identifying, or what that container holds.
My company only produces Active tags. These tags are large, expensive and meant for tracking THINGS. Containers specifically - or large cost items, such as a vehicle(parts). Our tags are used on shipping containers and trucks, and pose no threat to personal privacy, unless you dont want people (yourself) to know what you placed inside some container which is being shipped from one port to the next.
Active tags, backed by batteries, arent just capable of greater range, they are capable of TELLING the reader system about events that occur. For example - we have some tags which have sensors on them. Light, temp. humidity, shock etc. These sensors can be set to alert if they go off or above threshold. This is important when you are concerned about the viability/integrity of the property the tag is "watching". Some medications spoil if exposed to certain temperatures for extended periods of time. The sensor tag can monitor temp then alert if it gets too high for too long. Some munitions automatically ARM themselves if they receive a certain amount of shock. so the tags would warn if a munition is armed, important to know if your going to be moving a box of explosives via crane or forklift.
Active tags cost between 60 and 85 dollars per tag. Are roughly 4" long and 1" high and 1.5" wide. Active tags run at 433 megahertz and 123 kilohertz (the two frequencies are used for two different functions: reading data from the tag (433) or sending commands to the tag (123)).
There are some new active tags which are smaller, and run on 802.11 (wifi) frequencies, but there are a great number of challenges in that freq. range.
Passive tags are a losing proposition for most companies as the manufacturing cost is greater than what the tag can be sold for. Before tags can be ubiquitous in products - they need to be throw-away cheap. some person I dont know said that the magic number for passive tags was.05 (a nickel) - but one thing that hasnt been talked about with regards to the mass use of RFID is the backend databases and logic application required to actually do anything with the data read from tags. This obviously implies the reader infrastructure as well.
There is a lot of supporting infrastructure required to do anything of interest with RFID - its not just that you deploy a bunch of tags and all of a sudden you c
The idea of the actual game world being distributed is a tough one sure, but the idea that the characters can be tranferable is not. I had come up with an idea whereby one could build an avatar and use that model in any game. I called the idea BinaryBeing - basically you would have a site where you have an account which stores your various avatars. You could have one that was a general avatar used in any games that allow your fully customized char. but you could also have theme-compliant avatars where a certain world/fantasy archetype is employed.
The ultimate goal is to allow users to build a character which they can carry with them in the long term. and be able to unlock certain character atributes based on the games they use that character in. For example, you might receive the ability to display certain physical atributes in your character or tatoos on your skins based on what games you have accessed with the avatar. Aditionally - if you and your peers guild together in one game, you could develop guild markings/styles/tatoos/apearances which could remain consistant in all games.
The development would be done in cooporation with the various game devs in an effort to ensure that the characters could comply with whatever base rules the developers designate.
All avatars would be hosted on a site and an in-game connection to your binaryBeing account would be made which would grab the avatar model to the game you are playing - or would show you the useable models to pick from...
One could provide a much more in depth character development UI - and the game devs wouldnt have to focus on that as much.
General IT budgets average around ~3% of revenue. Some companies are higher and some are lower, but its a good ball park.
---
I am an IT manager with a background in architecture. I have done budgets ranging from several million up to 50M.
I previously worked in various architecture and design firms, large and small:
Lease your equipment.
Here is why:
Your a 20 person firm and you may have a dual role as CAD manager/drafter/arch and IT guy. CAD programs (like autocad) do progress (albeit slowly) and you will likely want to refresh your machines on a semi regular basis ~2 or 3 years.
Autocad runs nicely on all modern machines, as video memory has come up.
The thing that you will want to determine is what your firm does that is above the system requirements of autocad. (eg do you do any rendering, real 3D work etc.)
Most Architectural firms I have worked with did not do much of this, and their requirements fell into:
- Server (storage) - Web Server (or hosted site) - FTP Server (most arch firms need to send receive struct eng drawings etc.. VSFTPD is best) - File Backup Server - Mail - Workstations
All of these items can be put on a lease with a company like Dell. In this way you know you monthly required budget, and at the same time have a depreciation schedule to follow. Lease terms are cost of machine / 36. Ensure that you have the option to replace the system with a new machine for the same lease terms...
all other items in your budget should be things like:
Misc equipment purchases: usually budget for 1000 per quarter on a network your size. Consulting Fees: for the times when you need outside help ~5K per quarter
You should be able to get your hardware costs to a known state by leasing them, then youll have the rest of your budget as contingency items...
One thing that actually works really well for tracking budgets is MS project. You can enter an item, associate a date for (implementation/replacement/purchase/etc) and associate a budget amount with it as well.
(sorry for the jumpyness of this message I wrote it in spurts over 4 hours as am busy at work:)
I am holding in my hand 56 Treo Styus' that represent every treo RMA'd in the last year. When you RMA a treo, they do not want you to send in the stylus.
In addition to these 56, there are several others ~10 more which i dont have the stylus for due to users who lose or bend theirs and would like a replacement.
Thanks for the long list of applications, I appreciate that - but as I mentioned we do not install anything otehr than the Good software on the treos as we go through them so regularly.
My personal 4 other treos were replaced due to the following events:
- I dropped it in my dining room on hardwood floor and it would not turn back on. (I have dropped the thing many many times, and this time was no more "hard of a fall" than any other)
- The screen got really really dim (twice)
- Horrid screeching when I make calls
While I admit that some of our users abuse the little things probably more than they should, such as when they are deployed to places like iraq and kuwait, most of us; myself included, are regular users just sometimes clumsy.
These things are just not very well made. As a final example I got off a call at about 10:30am today and when I took the phone and put it down next to my laptop it rebooted. It crashed twice today once when I was looking at a word doc attachement to an email and again when attempting to select a user from my address book to SMS...
I dont care how long you have had your device, I have had several and over 60 RMAs
Slashdot Mirror
there is this company in the bay area that I have used, while their prices are currently slightly higher than whats quoted in the article - its still a good service:
http://www.protopulsion.com/
Question: Where can i put my snakes.
Question: I have fully switched to Ubuntu for one of my work laptops and all of my home systems. (I still have windows laptop at work for various reasons)
I effectively run default desktop 7.10 with Gnome. -- Can I easily swap between DEs? I actually have no idea of the diff between KED and Gnome (ill find an TFA) but how can I choose which to run at startup? (if this is possible)
great points, Agreed.
What I love is that I am watching the future unfold in technology that seems to be leading straight to the future we commonly depict in Anime...
I just hope there is less of a totalitarian overlay than we seem to be headed for.
grr... replied to wrong post.. this was meant to you:
SOX based IT Controls have a lot more to do with human discipline than simply electronic lock down.
Here is a story about unammed very large defense contractor I worked for:
(These guys have the most strict latop/desktop policies I have seen)
Their employees would go to a vendor in taiwan and they were only allowed to transfer information between certain systems at the TW vendor site and corporate machines via USB keys so that no networking was taking place (modern day sneaker net) as there were active atacks coming from unnamed asian power house.
Even though they were at a 3rd party vendor and USB keys was only transfer vector - the asian country had compromised the TW vendor systems and installed trojans that specifically targeted USB keys as they knew unnamed contractor laptops were passing data via this vector...
The point is; Being a lockout nazi on all systems does not give you that much more security. The best security is arrived through a balance of user behaviour education and reasoned thought out computer security and maintenance... The problem is that the correct way to do this takes a lot more resource than the lazy ways...
SOX based IT Controls have a lot more to do with human discipline than simply electronic lock down.
Here is a story about unammed very large defense contractor I worked for:
(These guys have the most strict latop/desktop policies I have seen)
Their employees would go to a vendor in taiwan and they were only allowed to transfer information between certain systems at the TW vendor site and corporate machines via USB keys so that no networking was taking place (modern day sneaker net) as there were active atacks coming from unnamed asian power house.
Even though they were at a 3rd party vendor and USB keys was only transfer vector - the asian country had compromised the TW vendor systems and installed trojans that specifically targeted USB keys as they knew unnamed contractor laptops were passing data via this vector...
The point is; Being a lockout nazi on all systems does not give you that much more security. The best security is arrived through a balance of user behaviour education and reasoned thought out computer security and maintenance... The problem is that the correct way to do this takes a lot more resource than the lazy ways...
Awesome!
They had the first (second) Star Wars Trilogy on TV last night and I got all in the Jedi mood - so its great to hear about this now.
Agreed,
I allow users to be a local admin or power user on their machine for two reasons:
Important for me:
1. We are STRICT about A/V and system updates.
Important for them:
2. Users often times (when given a laptop) start to use the laptop as their primary machine. They will use it to do their taxes, do all their online shopping/browsing/webmail etc. and use it for entertainment etc... It consumes too much of my departments time dealing with little complaints about apps like IM FTP webex etc...
The user should have some freedom over their day-to-day environment.
It is my job to ensure IT has done due-diligence with AV and filtering and *EDUCATION* on how to keep a machine clean for the users.
Yes this is the main problem with the concept of "embracing super users"
At several companies people outside IT have floated the idea that there should be a departmental super user who people within the department can go to with issues. The idea being that a highly technical member of their department would understand their specific departmental tasks/duties/needs and be able to support them on "little or common" it requests.
The reality is that this effectively makes that person a member of IT - and the sad fact is that typically they are not in a position to have proper access to all systems/passwords etc to solve issues.
Aside from specific application support, its generally not a good idea to rely on Super Users to work on general IT issues.
What really needs to be addressed is properly staffing helpdesks with the APPROPRIATE resource.
This starts getting at the core of the problem within IT - Costs...
99% of IT departments are not *embraced themselves* by execs - who only see a bottom line problem; IT departments spend money. Lots of it.
Funding the correct resource in a department can be hard for small to mid size companies because they dont think a helpdesk person should cost them anything north of 50K, but the reality is that a quality baseline of skills is required in helpdesk.
While I ahve exceptional people on my staff, often times they are underpaid given their skill set. I think a rockstar helpdesk person can be worth around 80K per year. But as their skills grow even furtehr they are likely to go and want to become sys ads and sr sys ads. These guys range between 80 and 110 / yr depending on specifics.
Companies think helpdesk should be a lowly intern or some 45-50K person...
This results in mediocre skills and more importantly -- MOTIVATION. Thus the hole of "IT departments unable to meet or understand..."
budgeting for STAFF in IT should be spread as a cost to all departments. Each department should carry an expense for a portion of funding the pay of IT. Just in the same way they (typically, if budgeting is done correctly) share the load in the cost of capital projects.
Forgive my naivety,
but is there such thing as netsted particles?
Full objects, made of "bound particles" (polygons that when constrained to eachother act as an object) but that whole object can be a particle?
Then if destroyed the resultant triagles themselves become particles?
I ask in that I would like to know if a whole seemingly static scene can really be generated/destroyed/interacted with as if everything were particles...
Or is this how things are already done??
It just seems to me that super-particles is how reality is built anyway....
Ah yes!
:)
M59 - I concede to that...
Though, id say that as far as subscription rates it is of my opinion that UO was the first MMORPG on a wide scale. However - I could be wrong.
I appreciate you pointing out my bias due to me being an early beta on UO and shunning M59....
What about using it as a departmental imaging server.
With a 160GB drive - put some images on the router - plug a machine into a VLAN and the machine could then boot off the network and be imaged with the system image for that department/VLAN.
It could be used for Caching and proxy services.
How about a web based chat channel. - jsut enter the IP of your default Gateway and you get a web based chat room. You can see all the other people on your subnet hanging from that device - and see its peers - you could then open channels to upstream routers as well - maybe the admins could control how many hops away you can see.
How about an integrated monitoring app. Go to the IP of the gateway and it will show you waht services it thinks your system is running (and the services of all the other machines directly attached) and you can configure monitoring and alerts for those services. Log in and tell it "this machine I am on is a web server - check this URL if you cant get to it email/SMS me"
I absolutely HATE the fact that there is no intrinsic bandwidth monitoring and reporting in many networking devices. I would want the machine to have integrated traffic reporting at every hub. (you know what I mean by hub). I should be able to look at all flows through a router/switch and see what/how much/who is doing what. And I shouldnt have to ahve some external app/license to do so.
You mis-spelled Richard Garriot.
The first days of UO back in 1997 were actually some of the most fun, as when UO came out - there wasnt really any precedent for any of the behavior that is now defacto MMORPG (as in with MUDS it was slightly less dynamic)
GMs invisibly following around PVP guilds (like ours) to learn how people interacted and gamed-the-game - these resulted in patches very rapidly, WOW has taken the best of its predecessors and expounded upon them in spades.
They have done a great job - I just wish i was 10+ years younger and could spend any time enjoying it...
I have two ideas:
(I dont know if this is implementable)
A USB encryption device that looks like any other USB key - when plugged in and its running, all data is routed through it and encrypted. Both traffic intended for wired interfaces and wireless.
the traffic could be routed to any number of "open" community run proxies as the device could be setup to create a tunnel between you and that proxy.
---
In 2002 I wrote a short white paper on an idea to use NBAR/ deep packet inspection to allow for service based routing of traffic and advertising in public networks.
Basically the idea would be very loosly based on the principle behind JXTA - where a user who attaches to a wireless public mesh is connected with resources that are geographically closest to him (I hadnt thought of GPS as a part of the system for some reason) - but the idea would be that if you wanted to print you would simply "print" i.e. send your print job and the network would route the job to the closest printer. The idea was that the network would dynamically route based on the intent of the flow...
So on the one hand you want the network to be "the pipes are not aware of the water flowing throguh them" and on the other you want the network and computers to "just work" (menaing no configuration necessary)...
"People play Verbosity because it is fun, and as a side effect of them playing, we collect accurate common-sense knowledge"
Thought harvesting?
This wasn't about being funny - it was about being, uh, truthinessful.
He made some brilliant remarks up there - and he held no punches. The "Scott McClellan can say nothing like nobody else" was terrific.
I hope this inspires more people to have the balls to say what they feel and know about the tyranny that has strangled this nation.
F.O.R.C.E. == Flexible Optical Recreation [of] Cenematic Environments
F.O.R.C.E. == Film Origination Realized [through] Computer Enhancement
(in all seriousness though - this is what the Presidio was designed for - was to facilitate extremely high collaboration between the groups developing digital media. I think that (someone) will be successful (moreso than now) with this, I can only hope though that as this tech matures the "plastic-ness" of the generated movies will dissapear (e.g. King Kong)
While I agree with your point - and I too have successfully boycotted (sp) Nike for as long as I can remember - I want to comment on the "between the lines" story here:
What's really interesting about this article is that we are seeing the Tip of the Iceberg in what could wind up being a powerhouse of technical services offered by Google.
Just like the Google hosting.
I had been predicting (to my self and a few friends only) what I was expecting to see from Google as the logical steps in their development:
Google hosting - what better way to index all the sites than if they are already hosted in your infrastructure
Google mail - same case
Technical services - as we now see with Nike - but I expect that this will become a larger offering.
I am not a Google fan-boy - but I have been watching their stride towards these types of steps with great interest - and have so far been successfully surmising what their next steps would be, along with most other people I assume - as it seems to be a fairly obvious progression...
But - the kicker here is the "don't be evil" statement. At some point Google will become that Microsoft or AT&T - public perception of them will be evil. Though it may just be out of shear jealousy over others' lack of resources to be able to pre-empt obvious next business steps - or even jealousy over not being a part of the development of this company.
Imagine 5 years from now - if Google is successful in their deployment of a private global network using their DC nodes and dark fiber they have been purchasing, what that will do to "Google specific QOS" - where their indexing traffic - or application traffic gets priority across those lines at specific times (or always) - it will, be amazing to see how a network like that will work and be managed.
The great thing I see though is how organically ideas are created here - but how quickly Google jumps on them. Though it does scare me a bit...
Wait to see if Google tech services begin to compete with IBM. (Not that it would be hard IBM tech services sucks - in my experience)
actually I us IM on my treo quite a bit - I use VeriChat which allows me to be online on Yahoo and AOL all the time... it was 25 bucks for a year - and i have found it to be a valuable tool. Though I avoid using it while driving.
Its a realtive statement I guess. There are tags from some of the smaller manufacturers that are trying to place more data in the tag - but according to some of our engineers you ahve to keep the data sizes small due to the speed and power to read them.
If you are taking hundreds of reads minute, then pulling 256K can prove to be a difficult matter, how many tags can you hear from a reader at one time? Lots.
Also, there is a problem with encryption and security. Most tags are not encrypted - nor are they locked to any reader - you ping it - it will respond. Some challenges are around getting the tags to only listen to *your* infrastructure.
Ill go talk to one of our lead engineers and get more specifics on this.
I have one of the most highly polished Tin-Foil-Hats around, but I am not terribly worried about RFID, not the commercially advertised incarnations anyway.
.05 (a nickel) - but one thing that hasnt been talked about with regards to the mass use of RFID is the backend databases and logic application required to actually do anything with the data read from tags. This obviously implies the reader infrastructure as well.
I work as the IT manager for the largest RFID company in the world. We are *the* supplier of RFID tags and devices to the DoD. With the tags and devices available from my company and others; Matrics, Alien etc.. you needent worry. These tags are too expensive, or also too big and too weak to be of concern to people. (Expensive being the primary gating item to ubiquity)
However - i would remind people that a cell phone is far more an unknown and exploitable device than the current commercially advertised and known RFID tags.
RFID is a phenomenon that has been known about for a long time. (as are cell phones which were first proofed in the 40s) and falls into two categories; Active or Passive. Active tags have a battery which powers the antennae - passive tags merely respond to RF waves that pass through them and "reply" with a unique signature.
Passive tags hold very little data, usually just an ID - or serial number (around 1K-ish - historically). Active tags have memory (256/512K ish) and can hold real data, such as the manifest of a shipping container.
The data still needs to be read and dealt with in a meaningful way. Passive IDs need to be correlated to a backend DB which equates the ID with some meaningful data, such as a record of what that ID actually represents.
Active tags are a bit more flexible in that they can provide info which does not necessarily require access to a backed DB in order to understand what the tag is identifying, or what that container holds.
My company only produces Active tags. These tags are large, expensive and meant for tracking THINGS. Containers specifically - or large cost items, such as a vehicle(parts). Our tags are used on shipping containers and trucks, and pose no threat to personal privacy, unless you dont want people (yourself) to know what you placed inside some container which is being shipped from one port to the next.
Active tags, backed by batteries, arent just capable of greater range, they are capable of TELLING the reader system about events that occur. For example - we have some tags which have sensors on them. Light, temp. humidity, shock etc. These sensors can be set to alert if they go off or above threshold. This is important when you are concerned about the viability/integrity of the property the tag is "watching". Some medications spoil if exposed to certain temperatures for extended periods of time. The sensor tag can monitor temp then alert if it gets too high for too long. Some munitions automatically ARM themselves if they receive a certain amount of shock. so the tags would warn if a munition is armed, important to know if your going to be moving a box of explosives via crane or forklift.
Active tags cost between 60 and 85 dollars per tag. Are roughly 4" long and 1" high and 1.5" wide. Active tags run at 433 megahertz and 123 kilohertz (the two frequencies are used for two different functions: reading data from the tag (433) or sending commands to the tag (123)).
There are some new active tags which are smaller, and run on 802.11 (wifi) frequencies, but there are a great number of challenges in that freq. range.
Passive tags are a losing proposition for most companies as the manufacturing cost is greater than what the tag can be sold for. Before tags can be ubiquitous in products - they need to be throw-away cheap. some person I dont know said that the magic number for passive tags was
There is a lot of supporting infrastructure required to do anything of interest with RFID - its not just that you deploy a bunch of tags and all of a sudden you c
The idea of the actual game world being distributed is a tough one sure, but the idea that the characters can be tranferable is not. I had come up with an idea whereby one could build an avatar and use that model in any game. I called the idea BinaryBeing - basically you would have a site where you have an account which stores your various avatars. You could have one that was a general avatar used in any games that allow your fully customized char. but you could also have theme-compliant avatars where a certain world/fantasy archetype is employed.
The ultimate goal is to allow users to build a character which they can carry with them in the long term. and be able to unlock certain character atributes based on the games they use that character in. For example, you might receive the ability to display certain physical atributes in your character or tatoos on your skins based on what games you have accessed with the avatar. Aditionally - if you and your peers guild together in one game, you could develop guild markings/styles/tatoos/apearances which could remain consistant in all games.
The development would be done in cooporation with the various game devs in an effort to ensure that the characters could comply with whatever base rules the developers designate.
All avatars would be hosted on a site and an in-game connection to your binaryBeing account would be made which would grab the avatar model to the game you are playing - or would show you the useable models to pick from...
One could provide a much more in depth character development UI - and the game devs wouldnt have to focus on that as much.
when I worked at intel I was told that the per chip cost was $48.00 - this was in '99..
man I loved that site. I loved having DVDs delivered to my office in SF after purchasing them online - within an hour.
Is there anything like this around any more?
This is a great response.
:)
General IT budgets average around ~3% of revenue. Some companies are higher and some are lower, but its a good ball park.
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I am an IT manager with a background in architecture. I have done budgets ranging from several million up to 50M.
I previously worked in various architecture and design firms, large and small:
Lease your equipment.
Here is why:
Your a 20 person firm and you may have a dual role as CAD manager/drafter/arch and IT guy. CAD programs (like autocad) do progress (albeit slowly) and you will likely want to refresh your machines on a semi regular basis ~2 or 3 years.
Autocad runs nicely on all modern machines, as video memory has come up.
The thing that you will want to determine is what your firm does that is above the system requirements of autocad. (eg do you do any rendering, real 3D work etc.)
Most Architectural firms I have worked with did not do much of this, and their requirements fell into:
- Server (storage)
- Web Server (or hosted site)
- FTP Server (most arch firms need to send receive struct eng drawings etc.. VSFTPD is best)
- File Backup Server
- Mail
- Workstations
All of these items can be put on a lease with a company like Dell. In this way you know you monthly required budget, and at the same time have a depreciation schedule to follow. Lease terms are cost of machine / 36. Ensure that you have the option to replace the system with a new machine for the same lease terms...
all other items in your budget should be things like:
Misc equipment purchases: usually budget for 1000 per quarter on a network your size.
Consulting Fees: for the times when you need outside help ~5K per quarter
You should be able to get your hardware costs to a known state by leasing them, then youll have the rest of your budget as contingency items...
One thing that actually works really well for tracking budgets is MS project. You can enter an item, associate a date for (implementation/replacement/purchase/etc) and associate a budget amount with it as well.
(sorry for the jumpyness of this message I wrote it in spurts over 4 hours as am busy at work
I am holding in my hand 56 Treo Styus' that represent every treo RMA'd in the last year. When you RMA a treo, they do not want you to send in the stylus.
In addition to these 56, there are several others ~10 more which i dont have the stylus for due to users who lose or bend theirs and would like a replacement.
Thanks for the long list of applications, I appreciate that - but as I mentioned we do not install anything otehr than the Good software on the treos as we go through them so regularly.
My personal 4 other treos were replaced due to the following events:
- I dropped it in my dining room on hardwood floor and it would not turn back on. (I have dropped the thing many many times, and this time was no more "hard of a fall" than any other)
- The screen got really really dim (twice)
- Horrid screeching when I make calls
While I admit that some of our users abuse the little things probably more than they should, such as when they are deployed to places like iraq and kuwait, most of us; myself included, are regular users just sometimes clumsy.
These things are just not very well made. As a final example I got off a call at about 10:30am today and when I took the phone and put it down next to my laptop it rebooted. It crashed twice today once when I was looking at a word doc attachement to an email and again when attempting to select a user from my address book to SMS...
I dont care how long you have had your device, I have had several and over 60 RMAs