A "private cloud" is generally understood to mean a cloud maintained by an internal IT department which sells services on the cloud to other departments within an organization. So, it's just like any other cloud, except it's on the intranet, and the customers are departments within the same company, rather than the public at large.
"Cloud computing" has two distinct meanings. Creating your own cloud, meaning creating a server farm on which you run multiple VMs that are able to seamlessly and automatically move from one physical server to another in response to capacity needs, fault tolerance, or physical maintenance, is a good idea. Properly designed, it gives you excellent redundancy at a relatively low cost.
Cloud computing as its being used in the tech rags, as in handing all of your data to an external provider who puts it on their "cloud", is basically the same as shared hosting, except people are using it to store much more sensitive data than they would ever dream of putting on a shared hosting service. That type of cloud computing is a foolish idea, and people need to get past the buzzword and see that, from the customer perspective, your data being in "the cloud" is meaningless...the important part is that you're handing total control over your data to a third party. What sort of technology infrastructure they actually use to host it is just a meaningless detail.
Well, then you missed the part where a guy from Google is making the claim, and saying that it's primarily because ad companies don't have the expertise in-house to keep up with the latest web performance tricks. Of course, technology companies like Google do, so presumably their ad servers don't bog things down like those other companies' servers do. Oh, did we mention Google also just happens to have an ad serving platform that you could use instead of the ones run by these Luddite ad companies that can barely keep a web server running? Let me point you to our AdSense sales team for more information.
The fact that ad servers tend to screw things up is nothing new. This guy's primary purpose is not so much to point that out, but rather to claim that Google's ad servers don't have that problem, so maybe web admins should use them instead.
Even so, claiming they use 10.249.x.x is not proof of anything. The entire 10.x.x.x subnet is reserved for private network use, so any number of companies could be and probably are using that exact same subnet. All they need is a halfway-competent network administrator to tell the court about the concept of private IP space, and that bit of evidence is worthless.
Facebook also has deep flaws, both in technology and management, that present big opportunities for a potential competitor. Facebook makes money now because its userbase has reached a critical mass, and its thought that since everyone uses it, no one will want to move off it. People thought the same thing about MySpace just a few years ago, and now it's widely regarded as the ghetto of the Internet, and people are leaving it in droves. To go back further, Yahoo was the darling of the tech economy before Google showed up.
Make no mistake about it, Facebook is very vulnerable. All it needs is someone with the brains and business model to exploit those vulnerabilities, and it's finished. Facebook may be a smart short-term play, but holding their stock for the long term would be a disaster.
I'm not saying kids who are being bullied online should turn off their computers forever, I'm saying the immediacy issue that would require a 911-like service isn't there. They can temporarily log off, and then tell their parents about it at dinner, or call the police and ask for help. There's no immediate physical danger involved, so there's no need for an immediate response capability.
Your access to the Internet is limited basically to the box on your desk, or the phone in your hand, or other devices that are similarly entirely under your control. It's not like normal harassment or bullying in that you can easily get away from it simply by turning off the device you're using to access it. If you're getting bullied in real life, you have to try to run away and get help immediately before your attackers catch up with you and continue the beating. Online, you can simply get off the computer and tell the proper authorities (be that the police or your parents or whoever) at your leisure. There is not the same need for immediacy.
Also, the whole idea of grooming children (or more often FBI agents posing as children) is that the pedophile gets the child to believe they're safe, and so they would have no motivation to push the little dolphin button. The kids that go off to meet pedophiles do so because they don't perceive that they're in any danger. If they don't perceive the danger, why would they alert the police to anything?
That may be true, but the issue is that the stuff that isn't low-hanging fruit, even though there are people that want to add it, is actively being deleted. When you go on to Wikipedia for the first time and submit an article that immediately gets deleted because it isn't "noteworthy", you're going to get frustrated and leave, and take whatever other contributions you might have made in the future with you.
The noteworthiness filter, and the arbitrary nature with which it's applied by editors more motivated by protecting their own personal turf than building a quality resource, is ruining the site for a lot of people.
I find it particularly egregious that on their "five facts" page, which is trying to get people to donate money, Fact #4 states: "We exist so that every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge." The noteworthiness nonsense makes this a blatant lie. They are no longer in any way interested in "the sum of all knowledge" and are in fact actively working to keep the site from becoming the sum of all knowledge. However, they're still more than happy to claim that as their goal because it sounds good for fundraising purposes.
Wikipedia was supposed to end up being something akin to a compendium of all human knowledge, which in theory could never really be "full" because human knowledge always expands. The problem is, the powers that be over there decided to arbitrarily apply their "noteworthy" filter on everything, and so they've collapsed the infinite array of human knowledge down into a decidedly finite set of "relevant" human knowledge. Of course, they alone are the arbiters of what is and isn't relevant, and wield the delete hammer often. Under these circumstances, yes you'll eventually come to the end of what is "appropriate" for wikipedia.
Having said that, I don't think even with their draconian and arbitrary relevancy policies that they're anywhere near the end of everything that would fit on the site. The issue is not that they're running out of things to put up, it's that they're actively driving contributors away by subjecting them to all these hoops to jump through that didn't exist before. You have the old guard admins fighting amongst themselves, and throwing up arbitrary restrictions to make it harder and more frustrating for new editors to get involved.
Wikipedia is also much more susceptible to rot than most other sites. Without a steady stream of admins coming in and doing the grunt work of cleaning up the many thousands of articles on the site, those articles will eventually be taken over by the trolls and become useless. Eventually, enough articles will suffer this fate that no one will consider the site any kind of good resource anymore, and we will have lost something truly remarkable.
Wikipedia as it stood not too long ago was a remarkable testament to the power of collaborative editing, and represented an incredible resource. If it continues the slide it's on, it will end up being an object lesson in how political infighting and needless bureaucracy (particularly bureaucracy designed to protect personal fiefdoms) can ruin things for everyone.
If it was in the agreement, I don't see why it wouldn't be legal. Since smokers are not a protected class, they can be discriminated against by private industry without any legal repercussions.
Of course, if it's not in the agreement, you could argue breach of contract (or whatever the particular legal term would in this case) because they're trying to impose additional conditions on the warranty after it's already been purchased.
The better question would be why Ricky believes not releasing nightly builds is "not a great idea". What part of Microsoft's standard development cycle would benefit from nightly builds? Why would Microsoft decide to release nightly builds, which are inherently unstable, to a public that loves to pick on MS for producing unstable software? Why would MS risk some bored journalist writing a hit piece on IE 9 based on a particularly faulty nightly build just on the off chance someone out in the ether might give them some useful feedback on it?
In short, why the hell would they release nightly builds?
Exactly. A mobile phone, even a smart phone, is far more of an appliance (or a game console) than a standard computer is, and you will lose if you try to treat it like a computer. Apple understands this and offers a uniform experience with a tightly controlled OS and tightly controlled applications available through a simple and easy to use app store interface. Developers only have to develop for one set of hardware requirements, and can fully take advantage of that piece of hardware.
Android, on the other hand, is an open platform designed to work on a wide variety of devices. This means that developers have to design their apps for the lowest common denominator of all these devices, or create different versions for each device depending on its capabilities. This means they can't effectively take advantage of advanced features or greater available resources in the high end phones, because they'll lose out on all of the potential customers with the lower end models. This is much more akin to developing for PCs rather than consoles.
If people saw their phones as personal computers, Android's model would be more successful. However, it doesn't seem to fit in with how most people use their phones. It will find purchase among the small segment of the market that enjoys endlessly tinkering with their gadgets, or philosophically oppose closed designs enough to forgo the iPhone, but the majority of the population will continue to flock to the iPhone.
You're missing the most important part of all of this, as revealed in this quote from the emails:
One other thing about the CC paper - just found
another email - is that McKittrick says it is standard practice in Econometrics journals
to give all the data and codes !!
These guys are taking advice from McKittrick! That guy almost started World War III back in 1983 because some kid hacked into the WOPR and decided to play a game with it! Do we really want this guy influencing our global climate change policy?
Actually, I only posted it so self-righteous windbags could call me an idiot and feel superior about themselves because they clearly know more about how the legal system works than anyone else.
a law firm is able, via class action or any other means, to make it illegal for a company to screw with my console
Are you new? Class-action suits don't make anything illegal. In nearly all cases, the result of a class-action is a settlement in which the defendant gives an assload of cash to the plaintiff's lawyers, those lawyers give out coupons for 50 cents off the defendant's products to all of the class members, and the defendant admits no fault. Since no fault was admitted, and the case never actually went to trial, there's no precedent set, and the defendant and everyone else can keep doing whatever it was they were doing before while the lawyers for the plaintiffs build a new pool so they can swim around in their new money.
I see a business opportunity for folks willing to be a TV "mule" to smuggle big-screens into the state.
I don't think this would be as popular as you might think. I can only think of one person who would be capable of kiestering a 65-inch TV, and even he might be turned off by the sharp corners.
Summary of the summary: People who get stuff for free don't like it when they're asked to start paying for that stuff. Further, people on the Internet (and especially places like Second Life) LOVE to complain about stuff, and have lots and lots of time to do it. Therefore, when a company that caters to people on the Internet who have lots of time on their hands decides to charge for stuff, the impotent rage reaches epic proportions. Before you know it, disembodied penises start flying everywhere.
Summary of the summary of the summary: People on the Internet complain about everything. Companies like to make money. Result: Nerd (or in this case, Furry) Rage.
external media like USB sticks are a bit too fragile according to my taste
That's because you're using the wrong external media. You're going for new and exciting and not old and reliable. What you need to do is convert all of your data to human-readable binary (you know, 1100110001111 and so on), and chisel it on to large stone tablets. These are extremely resistant to wear, especially if stored with the written side down, and are virtually theft proof (who's going to steal a bunch of 500-pound rocks?).
You can also easily transfer data from one machine to another either via forklift or just by bringing the machines to the tablets themselves. Backup to Jungle Disk is simple: store a second set of tablets in the Amazon (you can even have a DR site in southeast Asia!), and hire local villagers to update them for you. You should provide a telegraph machine to the villagers to send data back and forth for synchronization purposes. If the telegraph is too unreliable, you can use an elaborate network of smoke signal or semaphore (the thing with the flags) specialists to send data back and forth.
Encryption may be a little more difficult, but easily solved if you happen to have a couple of old Enigma machines sitting around (and really, who doesn't?). If the Enigma machine isn't reliable enough, Little Orphan Annie decoder pins can be used instead.
Given that the FAA is responsible for the lives of thousands of people who travel by air every day, not to mention cargo planes which represent billions of dollars in economic activity, I'd be extremely alarmed if they were constantly switching to the latest and greatest technology without testing each and every line of code in the entire software stack, up to and including the bare metal. Change is slow in organizations like that because it has to be. Improper testing can easily lead to lost lives, or at the very least huge delays like these ones that can cost millions in lost productivity.
How do you plan to integrate Ajax into the Web 2.0 Cloud to empower the Semantic Web using SaaS on top of a SOAP backend utilizing XML? What is the signal-to-buzzword ratio in day-to-day communications at your foundation? Isn't Ajax just soooo 2007, and shouldn't you rename your new project something more up-to-date, such as Tweetbook.blog?
Precisely. Comments about code that the developer himself doesn't understand, usually because he employed some nasty hack and he's not sure exactly why it worked, are usually short and contain the word "magic" in them.
For example:
/* Magic happens here*/ /* Black magic */ /* Some particularly dark black magic occurs here */ /* I'm not sure why this works, but it does */ /* I went on a vodka bender last night, and this was on my screen when I woke up. I don't know what it is, but it compiles, so let's ship the fucker. We'll call it Vista. */
So now we need to get up there with some drilling equipment and figure out if there's actually water beneath the surface or if the only water on the moon is trace amounts leftover from the occasional comet impact.
Slashdot Mirror
A "private cloud" is generally understood to mean a cloud maintained by an internal IT department which sells services on the cloud to other departments within an organization. So, it's just like any other cloud, except it's on the intranet, and the customers are departments within the same company, rather than the public at large.
"Cloud computing" has two distinct meanings. Creating your own cloud, meaning creating a server farm on which you run multiple VMs that are able to seamlessly and automatically move from one physical server to another in response to capacity needs, fault tolerance, or physical maintenance, is a good idea. Properly designed, it gives you excellent redundancy at a relatively low cost.
Cloud computing as its being used in the tech rags, as in handing all of your data to an external provider who puts it on their "cloud", is basically the same as shared hosting, except people are using it to store much more sensitive data than they would ever dream of putting on a shared hosting service. That type of cloud computing is a foolish idea, and people need to get past the buzzword and see that, from the customer perspective, your data being in "the cloud" is meaningless...the important part is that you're handing total control over your data to a third party. What sort of technology infrastructure they actually use to host it is just a meaningless detail.
Well, then you missed the part where a guy from Google is making the claim, and saying that it's primarily because ad companies don't have the expertise in-house to keep up with the latest web performance tricks. Of course, technology companies like Google do, so presumably their ad servers don't bog things down like those other companies' servers do. Oh, did we mention Google also just happens to have an ad serving platform that you could use instead of the ones run by these Luddite ad companies that can barely keep a web server running? Let me point you to our AdSense sales team for more information.
The fact that ad servers tend to screw things up is nothing new. This guy's primary purpose is not so much to point that out, but rather to claim that Google's ad servers don't have that problem, so maybe web admins should use them instead.
Even so, claiming they use 10.249.x.x is not proof of anything. The entire 10.x.x.x subnet is reserved for private network use, so any number of companies could be and probably are using that exact same subnet. All they need is a halfway-competent network administrator to tell the court about the concept of private IP space, and that bit of evidence is worthless.
When was Slashdot supposed to be a place to make friends? I come here for the news *cof*, old memes and car analogies.
You mean...
You're not...m-m-m-my...friend?!
*runs away sobbing*
Facebook also has deep flaws, both in technology and management, that present big opportunities for a potential competitor. Facebook makes money now because its userbase has reached a critical mass, and its thought that since everyone uses it, no one will want to move off it. People thought the same thing about MySpace just a few years ago, and now it's widely regarded as the ghetto of the Internet, and people are leaving it in droves. To go back further, Yahoo was the darling of the tech economy before Google showed up.
Make no mistake about it, Facebook is very vulnerable. All it needs is someone with the brains and business model to exploit those vulnerabilities, and it's finished. Facebook may be a smart short-term play, but holding their stock for the long term would be a disaster.
I'm not saying kids who are being bullied online should turn off their computers forever, I'm saying the immediacy issue that would require a 911-like service isn't there. They can temporarily log off, and then tell their parents about it at dinner, or call the police and ask for help. There's no immediate physical danger involved, so there's no need for an immediate response capability.
Your access to the Internet is limited basically to the box on your desk, or the phone in your hand, or other devices that are similarly entirely under your control. It's not like normal harassment or bullying in that you can easily get away from it simply by turning off the device you're using to access it. If you're getting bullied in real life, you have to try to run away and get help immediately before your attackers catch up with you and continue the beating. Online, you can simply get off the computer and tell the proper authorities (be that the police or your parents or whoever) at your leisure. There is not the same need for immediacy.
Also, the whole idea of grooming children (or more often FBI agents posing as children) is that the pedophile gets the child to believe they're safe, and so they would have no motivation to push the little dolphin button. The kids that go off to meet pedophiles do so because they don't perceive that they're in any danger. If they don't perceive the danger, why would they alert the police to anything?
That may be true, but the issue is that the stuff that isn't low-hanging fruit, even though there are people that want to add it, is actively being deleted. When you go on to Wikipedia for the first time and submit an article that immediately gets deleted because it isn't "noteworthy", you're going to get frustrated and leave, and take whatever other contributions you might have made in the future with you.
The noteworthiness filter, and the arbitrary nature with which it's applied by editors more motivated by protecting their own personal turf than building a quality resource, is ruining the site for a lot of people.
I find it particularly egregious that on their "five facts" page, which is trying to get people to donate money, Fact #4 states: "We exist so that every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge." The noteworthiness nonsense makes this a blatant lie. They are no longer in any way interested in "the sum of all knowledge" and are in fact actively working to keep the site from becoming the sum of all knowledge. However, they're still more than happy to claim that as their goal because it sounds good for fundraising purposes.
Wikipedia was supposed to end up being something akin to a compendium of all human knowledge, which in theory could never really be "full" because human knowledge always expands. The problem is, the powers that be over there decided to arbitrarily apply their "noteworthy" filter on everything, and so they've collapsed the infinite array of human knowledge down into a decidedly finite set of "relevant" human knowledge. Of course, they alone are the arbiters of what is and isn't relevant, and wield the delete hammer often. Under these circumstances, yes you'll eventually come to the end of what is "appropriate" for wikipedia.
Having said that, I don't think even with their draconian and arbitrary relevancy policies that they're anywhere near the end of everything that would fit on the site. The issue is not that they're running out of things to put up, it's that they're actively driving contributors away by subjecting them to all these hoops to jump through that didn't exist before. You have the old guard admins fighting amongst themselves, and throwing up arbitrary restrictions to make it harder and more frustrating for new editors to get involved.
Wikipedia is also much more susceptible to rot than most other sites. Without a steady stream of admins coming in and doing the grunt work of cleaning up the many thousands of articles on the site, those articles will eventually be taken over by the trolls and become useless. Eventually, enough articles will suffer this fate that no one will consider the site any kind of good resource anymore, and we will have lost something truly remarkable.
Wikipedia as it stood not too long ago was a remarkable testament to the power of collaborative editing, and represented an incredible resource. If it continues the slide it's on, it will end up being an object lesson in how political infighting and needless bureaucracy (particularly bureaucracy designed to protect personal fiefdoms) can ruin things for everyone.
If it was in the agreement, I don't see why it wouldn't be legal. Since smokers are not a protected class, they can be discriminated against by private industry without any legal repercussions.
Of course, if it's not in the agreement, you could argue breach of contract (or whatever the particular legal term would in this case) because they're trying to impose additional conditions on the warranty after it's already been purchased.
The better question would be why Ricky believes not releasing nightly builds is "not a great idea". What part of Microsoft's standard development cycle would benefit from nightly builds? Why would Microsoft decide to release nightly builds, which are inherently unstable, to a public that loves to pick on MS for producing unstable software? Why would MS risk some bored journalist writing a hit piece on IE 9 based on a particularly faulty nightly build just on the off chance someone out in the ether might give them some useful feedback on it?
In short, why the hell would they release nightly builds?
Exactly. A mobile phone, even a smart phone, is far more of an appliance (or a game console) than a standard computer is, and you will lose if you try to treat it like a computer. Apple understands this and offers a uniform experience with a tightly controlled OS and tightly controlled applications available through a simple and easy to use app store interface. Developers only have to develop for one set of hardware requirements, and can fully take advantage of that piece of hardware.
Android, on the other hand, is an open platform designed to work on a wide variety of devices. This means that developers have to design their apps for the lowest common denominator of all these devices, or create different versions for each device depending on its capabilities. This means they can't effectively take advantage of advanced features or greater available resources in the high end phones, because they'll lose out on all of the potential customers with the lower end models. This is much more akin to developing for PCs rather than consoles.
If people saw their phones as personal computers, Android's model would be more successful. However, it doesn't seem to fit in with how most people use their phones. It will find purchase among the small segment of the market that enjoys endlessly tinkering with their gadgets, or philosophically oppose closed designs enough to forgo the iPhone, but the majority of the population will continue to flock to the iPhone.
One other thing about the CC paper - just found another email - is that McKittrick says it is standard practice in Econometrics journals to give all the data and codes !!
These guys are taking advice from McKittrick! That guy almost started World War III back in 1983 because some kid hacked into the WOPR and decided to play a game with it! Do we really want this guy influencing our global climate change policy?
Actually, I only posted it so self-righteous windbags could call me an idiot and feel superior about themselves because they clearly know more about how the legal system works than anyone else.
Glad I could help.
a law firm is able, via class action or any other means, to make it illegal for a company to screw with my console
Are you new? Class-action suits don't make anything illegal. In nearly all cases, the result of a class-action is a settlement in which the defendant gives an assload of cash to the plaintiff's lawyers, those lawyers give out coupons for 50 cents off the defendant's products to all of the class members, and the defendant admits no fault. Since no fault was admitted, and the case never actually went to trial, there's no precedent set, and the defendant and everyone else can keep doing whatever it was they were doing before while the lawyers for the plaintiffs build a new pool so they can swim around in their new money.
Linus didn't start a nuclear war with Iran either
...yet.
I see a business opportunity for folks willing to be a TV "mule" to smuggle big-screens into the state.
I don't think this would be as popular as you might think. I can only think of one person who would be capable of kiestering a 65-inch TV, and even he might be turned off by the sharp corners.
Summary of the summary: People who get stuff for free don't like it when they're asked to start paying for that stuff. Further, people on the Internet (and especially places like Second Life) LOVE to complain about stuff, and have lots and lots of time to do it. Therefore, when a company that caters to people on the Internet who have lots of time on their hands decides to charge for stuff, the impotent rage reaches epic proportions. Before you know it, disembodied penises start flying everywhere.
Summary of the summary of the summary: People on the Internet complain about everything. Companies like to make money. Result: Nerd (or in this case, Furry) Rage.
external media like USB sticks are a bit too fragile according to my taste
That's because you're using the wrong external media. You're going for new and exciting and not old and reliable. What you need to do is convert all of your data to human-readable binary (you know, 1100110001111 and so on), and chisel it on to large stone tablets. These are extremely resistant to wear, especially if stored with the written side down, and are virtually theft proof (who's going to steal a bunch of 500-pound rocks?).
You can also easily transfer data from one machine to another either via forklift or just by bringing the machines to the tablets themselves. Backup to Jungle Disk is simple: store a second set of tablets in the Amazon (you can even have a DR site in southeast Asia!), and hire local villagers to update them for you. You should provide a telegraph machine to the villagers to send data back and forth for synchronization purposes. If the telegraph is too unreliable, you can use an elaborate network of smoke signal or semaphore (the thing with the flags) specialists to send data back and forth.
Encryption may be a little more difficult, but easily solved if you happen to have a couple of old Enigma machines sitting around (and really, who doesn't?). If the Enigma machine isn't reliable enough, Little Orphan Annie decoder pins can be used instead.
HTH.
Given that the FAA is responsible for the lives of thousands of people who travel by air every day, not to mention cargo planes which represent billions of dollars in economic activity, I'd be extremely alarmed if they were constantly switching to the latest and greatest technology without testing each and every line of code in the entire software stack, up to and including the bare metal. Change is slow in organizations like that because it has to be. Improper testing can easily lead to lost lives, or at the very least huge delays like these ones that can cost millions in lost productivity.
How do you plan to integrate Ajax into the Web 2.0 Cloud to empower the Semantic Web using SaaS on top of a SOAP backend utilizing XML? What is the signal-to-buzzword ratio in day-to-day communications at your foundation? Isn't Ajax just soooo 2007, and shouldn't you rename your new project something more up-to-date, such as Tweetbook.blog?
Precisely. Comments about code that the developer himself doesn't understand, usually because he employed some nasty hack and he's not sure exactly why it worked, are usually short and contain the word "magic" in them.
/* Magic happens here*/
/* Black magic */
/* Some particularly dark black magic occurs here */
/* I'm not sure why this works, but it does */
/* I went on a vodka bender last night, and this was on my screen when I woke up. I don't know what it is, but it compiles, so let's ship the fucker. We'll call it Vista. */
For example:
So now we need to get up there with some drilling equipment and figure out if there's actually water beneath the surface or if the only water on the moon is trace amounts leftover from the occasional comet impact.
Asked and answered.