Maybe Amazon should work with Google to build a locker on wheels using the self-driving car chassis. That seems a far more useful and practical long-term solution.
In the UK I'm paying 0.15 Euros a KW/h (Including Euro Tax, without "standing daily charge", but before some discounts). I may have overlooked the soviet power plants somewhere.
Snacking is what's new. 5 isles of the supermarket and most convenience stores are all about snacks. You can eat 3 fairly significant meals a day for 2000ish calories. However a typical "lunch" deal (Sandwich-600, Soda-200 and Chocolate Bar/Muffin/Cake-300) could easily be half of that.
Theres a whole industry and part of the economy that relies on this eating between meals. It's high calorie and doesn't tend satisfy actual hunger for very long.
I sometimes feel that exercise is overplayed in these discussions as people tend to over-compensate for the exercise with eating. There is nothing wrong with being fit, it has separate health benefits, but it rarely makes a difference in weight loss. The now and then difference is that kids in earlier generations would have been expected to walk/cycle to school independently from a young age (8+ - up to 6 miles a day was typical) This does make a difference, particularly when the playstation is 20 steps from the fridge.
Largo did this 20 years ago, and never got into Microsoft. They are very quiet in these summaries about technology use, but they use IBM AIX / SCO unix / Oracle / Linux solutions for their business applications These are not "free beer" or even "open source". They are also using a Citrix Metaframe on Windows, so they still need Windows Server CALs, RDS CALs and so on for these users, it's unclear to what extent access to these services are required, but 8 servers should easily host 100-200 concurrent users, so this implied that for most if not all users were still utilising Windows licenses.
We are still also not comparing like-with-like. A US City Council doesn't have the same remit as a UK Unitary Authority / County Council. We have responsibility for Education (From 3 years through 19, plus lifelong learning), plus social workers / care for 3-DEATH, including residential homes for seniors and life-long care for the disabled. This somewhat complicates the staffing and application portfolio.
I've used - although it is being phased out now - a Linux based thin-client OS for our Windows Terminal Services / Citrix Environments. I wouldn't however try to claim that this is a significant use of Linux or Open Source on the Desktop.
Amusingly I was the competent FOSS guy brought in to our council, after a year or so getting into the reality of the environment, I actually recommended a Microsoft EA, rather than the muddle of Linux/Windows we were using. I couldn't do *everything* and there was minimal scope for investment in new staff / training.
The grandparent post and the guy at hampshire is absolutely correct, Open Source desktop / office offers no *cost* advantage in a typical council. Working in IT for a council is an absolute slog, the app portfolio is in the hundreds, all of which are "business critical" to some team or other. Faffing around with a Linux based Desktop or Swapping out Microsoft Office is a poor use of time, which you'll soon realise is impossible without either utilising Windows licenses anyway for a terminal services solution for non-compatible apps or where App XYZ uses VBA for letter generation / mail merge etc. Before you know it, your spending more in time working out who can and can't use OpenOffice than the license itself costs. Office is one app, and in itself it's not that business critical, except for perhaps Outlook/Exchange for which there hasn't been an obvious candidate for an OS replacement.
We do of course use Open Source where it makes sense. GIS is very much going open-source, we have a few dozen CentOS/Redhat Servers (firewalls/file servers/tomcat etc.) , including our Council Tax system running on Linux. We are absolutely not scared of Open Source or Linux, but it just has a limited role on the desktop.
I've got drawers full of returned windows mobiles and early smartphones. Blackberries and iPhones were of course very different, but early smart phone sales definitely were returned or misused a lot. I can see wearable being exactly the same way!
I never saw a desktop computer offered without Windows prior to the anti-trust legislation. It's still rare now.
Although I actually think the IE thing was positive. Purchasing Netscape or using an AOL disk with custom browser was hurting the widespread use of the internet.
You are confusing remote wipe with deactivating a phone.
Remote Wipe (if successful) means that a lost or stolen phone if successful you can be as close to sure that no data on the device is still there. The thief is welcome to to the phone.
Deactivating the phone means that the smartphone cannot be used again. Apple have something close to this now with find my iPhone. A wiped iPhone cannot be reactivated without the original username and password, if it is still linked to your iCloud account. It is questionable as to whether this can be easily defeated. There are very few opportunities to jailbreak a device that is pending activation.
This is probably an issue with every Windows operating system using the update services, it's only visible with XP as it's the oldest supported operating system, so it has many, many more patches.
Yep and in fact despite what I said earlier, this could be worse. If google pre-fetch every image for instance, then this could have some horrid consequences. Such as confirming e-mail addresses.
Yes and the point the summary misses, is that the images are used to verify that you have received and viewed the e-mail. This is far more important than browser types / locations etc.
It also prevents some evil things, such as first time you hit the page you get a drive by, the second time (with cookie set) you get the actual image and all seems fine.
My gran lasted 15 days with no food or water after a stroke. The care home who saw her through this inevitable stage said that even wetting her lips with a sponge would keep her alive for a lot longer. Bear in mind that if you are in this shut down state your body doesn't need much of anything;
The trouble with Dell is that the support service isn't permitted to do a full replacement. You have to go part by part until you have a working system. The trouble is to go through all the parts on a typical server or PC can take weeks. This isn't quite what you expect when you have a 4 hour on site contract, you sort of expect to be back up and running in at the most a day or two.
Of course they don't really commit anything till you've gone through full diagnostics. Which can seem a bit of an irritation when you are struggling to recover a down service and you have a call centre insisting on dset, bios updates etc.
On the whole though I've been happy with Dell. If you are aware of these quirks then you can work with them.
Forget endurance failures, think more about firmware blowouts. The latter are far more likely and will take all your data with it, while leaving the drive for warranty purposes and statistics functional. Premature SMART errors are on thing on traditional hard drives due to bad firmware, but this trend with SSDs of firmware issues hosing all data is the real concern.
I think this device is all about getting corporates to go with the 5C rather than the 4S. For a small increment on the 4S you get the 4G connectivity and twice the storage. Corporates won't be pre-ordering.
This is a very neat way to increase revenues. Realistically for the consumer though, there is such a small difference that I'm sure that anyway going for the 5C is going to say screw it and go with the 5S full phone.
Yes, but. Bad firmware that can be fixed by flashing wouldn't generate a warranty return. Yet the customer has still lost all their data.
We have a lot (around 20 out of 100 drives in just over a year) of SSD firmware issues (resulting in lost data), but only one for destruction (we don't return drives).
That said, I have 288 drives in a traditional array (between 2->5 years per shelf), we replace under warranty 3-4 a year. This is still a very small sample.
This means that there are absolutely legitimate reasons to ask your ISP to turn off the filter. There was an implication that if you had kids and disabled the filter you might get some funny looks from the authorities. I run several VPNs for work based purposes, so good to know I have a cast iron reason for switching off any porn filter.
I've actually been thinking for a while that this could be really good for challenge / response systems. Hold the phone up to the laptop, let it talk. A reliable character a second is probably less painful than dealing with a human.
I agree for the small environment. A 50 man company will not need 1-2 IT people.
For the Enterprise, I doubt it. If you have more than 1,000 users you still have enough on-site hardware and networking to worry about, that you'll still need IT. Even if it's just for making purchasing decisions, pushing buttons for off site support, information governance, project management and resolving issues when multi-cloud services are in play, it's the latter that becomes the problem.
If you have multiple tenants for the same cloud services in one company behind one IP address, things start getting really interesting really fast. As when you and a partner company use different cloud services and you start having difficulties. Trust me.. Microsoft / Google etc. can't just stick Wireshark on their data centre to work out exactly what's happening. All current troubleshoot tends to rely on a non-cloud partner having these skills to give them the detail that they can't afford to investigate.
I'm not a nimby, I've helped and encouraged the use of a number of cloud services in my enterprise, particularly for easily solved problems or where it's so specialised or small that it's really not worth anyones time learning how to do it in house. I'm sure there will be a move to outsource a load of services to cloud providers.. It'll be when people try to switch for the first time that the difficulties arise. So I expect "Cloud Reconsidered" in 3-5 years. Probably also if there is another major 2E2 debacle or security breach or outage.
Slashdot Mirror
What do you mean?
Word =
File -> Save & Send -> Send as PDF
It couldn't be much easier.
Jason
Maybe Amazon should work with Google to build a locker on wheels using the self-driving car chassis. That seems a far more useful and practical long-term solution.
Jason.
In the UK I'm paying 0.15 Euros a KW/h (Including Euro Tax, without "standing daily charge", but before some discounts). I may have overlooked the soviet power plants somewhere.
Jason.
Snacking is what's new. 5 isles of the supermarket and most convenience stores are all about snacks. You can eat 3 fairly significant meals a day for 2000ish calories. However a typical "lunch" deal (Sandwich-600, Soda-200 and Chocolate Bar/Muffin/Cake-300) could easily be half of that.
Theres a whole industry and part of the economy that relies on this eating between meals. It's high calorie and doesn't tend satisfy actual hunger for very long.
I sometimes feel that exercise is overplayed in these discussions as people tend to over-compensate for the exercise with eating. There is nothing wrong with being fit, it has separate health benefits, but it rarely makes a difference in weight loss. The now and then difference is that kids in earlier generations would have been expected to walk/cycle to school independently from a young age (8+ - up to 6 miles a day was typical) This does make a difference, particularly when the playstation is 20 steps from the fridge.
Jason
Largo did this 20 years ago, and never got into Microsoft. They are very quiet in these summaries about technology use, but they use IBM AIX / SCO unix / Oracle / Linux solutions for their business applications These are not "free beer" or even "open source". They are also using a Citrix Metaframe on Windows, so they still need Windows Server CALs, RDS CALs and so on for these users, it's unclear to what extent access to these services are required, but 8 servers should easily host 100-200 concurrent users, so this implied that for most if not all users were still utilising Windows licenses.
We are still also not comparing like-with-like. A US City Council doesn't have the same remit as a UK Unitary Authority / County Council. We have responsibility for Education (From 3 years through 19, plus lifelong learning), plus social workers / care for 3-DEATH, including residential homes for seniors and life-long care for the disabled. This somewhat complicates the staffing and application portfolio.
I've used - although it is being phased out now - a Linux based thin-client OS for our Windows Terminal Services / Citrix Environments. I wouldn't however try to claim that this is a significant use of Linux or Open Source on the Desktop.
Shrug
Jason
Amusingly I was the competent FOSS guy brought in to our council, after a year or so getting into the reality of the environment, I actually recommended a Microsoft EA, rather than the muddle of Linux/Windows we were using. I couldn't do *everything* and there was minimal scope for investment in new staff / training.
The grandparent post and the guy at hampshire is absolutely correct, Open Source desktop / office offers no *cost* advantage in a typical council. Working in IT for a council is an absolute slog, the app portfolio is in the hundreds, all of which are "business critical" to some team or other. Faffing around with a Linux based Desktop or Swapping out Microsoft Office is a poor use of time, which you'll soon realise is impossible without either utilising Windows licenses anyway for a terminal services solution for non-compatible apps or where App XYZ uses VBA for letter generation / mail merge etc. Before you know it, your spending more in time working out who can and can't use OpenOffice than the license itself costs. Office is one app, and in itself it's not that business critical, except for perhaps Outlook/Exchange for which there hasn't been an obvious candidate for an OS replacement.
We do of course use Open Source where it makes sense. GIS is very much going open-source, we have a few dozen CentOS/Redhat Servers (firewalls/file servers/tomcat etc.) , including our Council Tax system running on Linux. We are absolutely not scared of Open Source or Linux, but it just has a limited role on the desktop.
Jason.
I've got drawers full of returned windows mobiles and early smartphones. Blackberries and iPhones were of course very different, but early smart phone sales definitely were returned or misused a lot. I can see wearable being exactly the same way!
Jason
And then spend the next 10 years accurately classifying the rest of the internet.
Jason.
I never saw a desktop computer offered without Windows prior to the anti-trust legislation. It's still rare now.
Although I actually think the IE thing was positive. Purchasing Netscape or using an AOL disk with custom browser was hurting the widespread use of the internet.
Jason.
You are confusing remote wipe with deactivating a phone.
Remote Wipe (if successful) means that a lost or stolen phone if successful you can be as close to sure that no data on the device is still there. The thief is welcome to to the phone.
Deactivating the phone means that the smartphone cannot be used again. Apple have something close to this now with find my iPhone. A wiped iPhone cannot be reactivated without the original username and password, if it is still linked to your iCloud account. It is questionable as to whether this can be easily defeated. There are very few opportunities to jailbreak a device that is pending activation.
Jason
This article reminded me of that one. Nice to see that one again.
Jason.
How many?
This is probably an issue with every Windows operating system using the update services, it's only visible with XP as it's the oldest supported operating system, so it has many, many more patches.
Jason
Yep and in fact despite what I said earlier, this could be worse. If google pre-fetch every image for instance, then this could have some horrid consequences. Such as confirming e-mail addresses.
Jason
Yes and the point the summary misses, is that the images are used to verify that you have received and viewed the e-mail. This is far more important than browser types / locations etc.
It also prevents some evil things, such as first time you hit the page you get a drive by, the second time (with cookie set) you get the actual image and all seems fine.
Jason.
My gran lasted 15 days with no food or water after a stroke. The care home who saw her through this inevitable stage said that even wetting her lips with a sponge would keep her alive for a lot longer. Bear in mind that if you are in this shut down state your body doesn't need much of anything;
Jason.
The trouble with Dell is that the support service isn't permitted to do a full replacement. You have to go part by part until you have a working system. The trouble is to go through all the parts on a typical server or PC can take weeks. This isn't quite what you expect when you have a 4 hour on site contract, you sort of expect to be back up and running in at the most a day or two.
Of course they don't really commit anything till you've gone through full diagnostics. Which can seem a bit of an irritation when you are struggling to recover a down service and you have a call centre insisting on dset, bios updates etc.
On the whole though I've been happy with Dell. If you are aware of these quirks then you can work with them.
Jason.
Forget endurance failures, think more about firmware blowouts. The latter are far more likely and will take all your data with it, while leaving the drive for warranty purposes and statistics functional. Premature SMART errors are on thing on traditional hard drives due to bad firmware, but this trend with SSDs of firmware issues hosing all data is the real concern.
Jason.
I think this device is all about getting corporates to go with the 5C rather than the 4S. For a small increment on the 4S you get the 4G connectivity and twice the storage. Corporates won't be pre-ordering.
This is a very neat way to increase revenues. Realistically for the consumer though, there is such a small difference that I'm sure that anyway going for the 5C is going to say screw it and go with the 5S full phone.
Jason.
Yes, but. Bad firmware that can be fixed by flashing wouldn't generate a warranty return. Yet the customer has still lost all their data.
We have a lot (around 20 out of 100 drives in just over a year) of SSD firmware issues (resulting in lost data), but only one for destruction (we don't return drives).
That said, I have 288 drives in a traditional array (between 2->5 years per shelf), we replace under warranty 3-4 a year. This is still a very small sample.
Jason
No, they were 5mm thin. It was an Apple product.
Jason.
No, this is excellent news.
This means that there are absolutely legitimate reasons to ask your ISP to turn off the filter. There was an implication that if you had kids and disabled the filter you might get some funny looks from the authorities. I run several VPNs for work based purposes, so good to know I have a cast iron reason for switching off any porn filter.
Excellent!
Jason.
wow - under your scheme my employer would have to add an additional 4000 staff.
You really thought that one through.
I've actually been thinking for a while that this could be really good for challenge / response systems. Hold the phone up to the laptop, let it talk. A reliable character a second is probably less painful than dealing with a human.
Jason.
I agree for the small environment. A 50 man company will not need 1-2 IT people.
For the Enterprise, I doubt it. If you have more than 1,000 users you still have enough on-site hardware and networking to worry about, that you'll still need IT. Even if it's just for making purchasing decisions, pushing buttons for off site support, information governance, project management and resolving issues when multi-cloud services are in play, it's the latter that becomes the problem.
If you have multiple tenants for the same cloud services in one company behind one IP address, things start getting really interesting really fast. As when you and a partner company use different cloud services and you start having difficulties. Trust me.. Microsoft / Google etc. can't just stick Wireshark on their data centre to work out exactly what's happening. All current troubleshoot tends to rely on a non-cloud partner having these skills to give them the detail that they can't afford to investigate.
I'm not a nimby, I've helped and encouraged the use of a number of cloud services in my enterprise, particularly for easily solved problems or where it's so specialised or small that it's really not worth anyones time learning how to do it in house. I'm sure there will be a move to outsource a load of services to cloud providers.. It'll be when people try to switch for the first time that the difficulties arise. So I expect "Cloud Reconsidered" in 3-5 years. Probably also if there is another major 2E2 debacle or security breach or outage.
I cloud be wrong.
Jason.