Seconded. Plus, a spirited ride on your average sportbike (which, incidentally most of them weigh north of 400lbs these days) can actually give you a pretty decent upper-body workout from the leaning, control and the constant movement in it.
It's funny... there's this attitude that riding a motorcycle is easy but it's coming from people who've never actually ridden one. I ride one most days during the year, even down to a few degrees above freezing (or sometimes below if there's no ice on the road) and love the fact that it gives me a feeling of exhilaration that my car just doesn't and allows me to do a little spirited riding and thus get a little bit of exercise before I melt into my cubicle for the day:)
Oh, and on-topic... yeah, I've ridden a Segway before. It was interesting, but only from a purely technological perspective. It's too big to be useful on the sidewalks of most cities I've ever been in, and too slow to actually do anything useful like... ooh, I dunno... go somewhere? Hell, if I even want to run to the store for a few small items I'd actually be far more likely to take my motorbike because between a backpack and my panniers (I ride a Kawasaki Concours 14) I can carry a hell of a lot more stuff than the Segway. So where's the point, again?
Ya know, I think it would be awesome if in the first episode of the new series there was going to be a scene with all the characters without mouths for some oddball reason. Call it a quick "reference" for all the geeks who followed this story:)
Sorry, I don't see this at all. Yes, I use Mozy, so I'm a little biased but if I had seen no use-case scenarios where it was helpful I probably wouldn't.
I pay for an unlimited account... there's currently about 90GB of data up there that I can think of... and yes, I've requested a restore on more than one occasion. Hell, there was a time I found I needed a particular file while I was out in Denver off my personal laptop which I didn't have with me (since it was a business trip). Yes, I can VPN into my home systems, but I also knew my laptop was closed and therefore asleep at home. I jumped onto Mozy and "restored" the file to my work laptop within 20 minutes at the hotel, modified it, used it, and copied it back to my personal laptop when I got home.
And bandwidth / internet limits? Uhm... OK... if you insist. Today is the 6th of July. Being a parent of two kids meant I took a lot of photographs on Saturday of my kids enjoying the day... and some video. Sync'ed to iPhoto on Saturday and then just left my laptop running while ~4GB of pictures got uploaded to Mozy. It's damned nice to know all that data is up there in the event I ever lost it. Yes, I also backup my critical files to a file server at home via rsync, but I find that less and less a necessity since Mozy has fulfilled my backup needs for some time. Oh yeah, and I periodically take an image backup of my laptop so that I can restore the entire system to a point in time... I just fire up Carbon Copy Cloner, plug in my Drobo and go out for the day:)
I am the exception to the rule I think; I keep LOTS of backups. But still, my point still stands; that Mozy and other online services are damned good value and don't suffer from the perceived problems that you mention... at least not in my experience.
My choice to buy a BMW 335i is as much driven by image as it is my passion for driving fast family saloons. I could buy an Honda Accord for half the money and still get within a second or two 1/4 mile... but where the hell would the fun be in that? It's boring... it's got numb handling and a respectable but unremarkable V6 engine. It could haul my family around just as well as the 335i, but I am going to choose the 335i or one of its competitors because I like the way it drives... but also because I love the way it looks (with the M sport package, anyway). I also love the fact that (from an image perspective) it's a twin-turbo six-cylinder 300hp monster in stock form, and can be modified with $1500 of electronics to do ~430hp.
I currently drive an aging BMW 330i... which has done me sterling service, but is really getting long in the tooth and over 100K miles. Sooner or later I'm going to have to replace it and I'm looking possibly at next year. As a result, I'm looking at a new car, and I'm quite set on a nice one... a new one. At the moment I'm looking very seriously at a BMW 335i or Mercedes C350. Believe it or not, Audi priced themselves out of the market because they provide (in my opinion) just not enough car for the money spent.
So what am I looking to spend? Funnily enough... right at $50,000. That equals monthly payments with a modest down payment of about $750 a month, give or take over five years. To me, that's doable.
I'm not trying to brag about my income... I earn a decent income but am by no means rich. My salary hasn't broken the magical six figure mark, and probably won't any time soon, but I still put this Model S in the realms of affordability because the only two things I do on credit are my mortgage and one car payment at a time... never more than that. No credit cards... live on cash.
So, here we have an American-built sedan that's in the $50,000 range... does sub 6-second 0-60, and as a bonus is a real technological tour de force. No, it won't hang with the 335i or C350 in the quarter... in fact it might but it'll run out of charge in an hurry. But still, the Model S becomes an extremely compelling American car... the only one I would really give a serious look (yes, I drove the Cadillac CTS and while it was a good car it didn't fit "me"). I like it... it has that Aston Martin / Maserati Quattroporte look that I love... a panorama roof (see the pics) and to boot is a zero emissions perfect commuting / light touring car. Wow. For $50,000?
All those who complain about range... so what? How often do you really drive more than 200 miles at a sitting? I can honestly say that my AVERAGE per day is about 40 miles... max. Maybe 50, tops on a day I go to lunch with my colleagues. I drive more than 200 miles maybe twice or three times a year to Chicago and / or Peoria. For that... I have my Kawasaki Concours 14 if I feel like running on two wheels and solo... or I can rent a car either one-way or return and not worry about it. Hell, to Chicago I can get the train and sleep during the trip.
I for one wish Tesla the best of luck. If my purchase I plan for next year ends up pushed back to 2011, then a quick trip to California to drive the S might be in the cards instead of my currently planned favourite; the 335i (which is an intoxicating piece of engineering, no mistake, there). The only thing I'd miss is I plan a European Delivery of the Bimmer, with a quick jaunt over the Alps via the Stelvio Pass to spend a week in Northern Italy. But if I end up choosing a Tesla S, then maybe I can still do it by renting a motorcycle instead:) I'd be able to with my gas savings... though my electricity bill will be intriguing.;)
Unfortunately you also missed the critical part of that paragraph; that I have too much invested in the WinMo platform over the last decade to really switch at the moment. To re-code (or have re-coded) the custom applications I have installed would be FAR more expensive than just the $100 cost of joining the developer program. At the moment, it's just not worth it.
Now, if more of my customers used iPhones, maybe... but so many of them are tied to Microsoft software (Exchange, Office and so forth) that they figure they may as well have a Windows phone. Their thinking may not be totally correct, but that's unfortunately life in the Corporate world. Besides, still not convinced that the iPhone is going to save the world;)
A lot of modern smartphones suffer these exact problems because of the push for more and more features. Basically, a feature add will add power draw, and will also tend to add CPU usage as the applications to run these new features crank up the utilization.
I don't have an iPhone... I have too much invested in the Windows Mobile platform dating back almost a decade to really migrate at this point (plus, I write some of my own little applets and upload to my phone all the time... can't do that with the iPhone without jailbreaking). However, I DO currently have an HTC Touch Pro, my previous device being an HTC Tilt. The majority of the time, the phone is excellent; it runs cool, it does exactly what I want when I want and doesn't have too many horribly nefarious bugs, though much of that probably has to do with the custom ROM I flashed to it. But if I start activating devices such as GPS, WiFi and other features like that it sometimes shocks me how hot the phone will get. Particularly if I'm using, say Google Maps as a GPS application.
Google Maps will turn on my GPS antenna, and then will start pulling data using my 3G connection (I have traffic turned on, too). Both of these add significant power draw and heat generation, and the GM app itself will tend to crank up the CPU. Because of the draw, and because most of the time I only use these functions together in the car I plug my phone into my car charger. But you know what? Then the screen stays on... more heat. Literally, my phone can get to the point where I'd be really uncomfortable holding that thing up to my ear... thank for Bluetooth headsets! Even if I skip Google Maps and use TomTom Mobile, it forces the screen to stay on so again the battery life goes into the toilet and I end up with a rather nice hand warmer on cold days.
Does it concern me? A little. I get concerned that this heat is going to shorten the life of my device significantly, but on the flip side I'm enough of a phone geek I tend to trade out my phones every couple of years anyway to get the "latest and greatest". Also, the Touch Pro has not shown any significant signs of being a problem child... it all works.
The Touch Pro has been pretty well engineered by HTC; they design a LOT of handsets for a lot of different markets. As a result, their experience in engineering these kind of form factors is really good. Their smartphone devices will dissipate heat quite well, and be none the worse for wear. My old Tilt still works as well as the day I bought it ~3 or 4 years ago, except that it's been dropped quite a number of times. Apple's problem is that they really don't have that experience, and as such they DO make mistakes with heat dissipation and things like that in a small form factor like the iPhone. They've done it before; their focus on aesthetics often takes over from the engineering portion... and while I know Apple has some phenomenal engineers, there's no replacement for experience. I think the engineering margins they built into the 3GS were just too tight for such a large CPU bump and general hardware bump. Everyone loves the fact that Apple used the same case (almost) for the 3GS... which is great for all those dock-equipped things that were designed for the 3G... but when you make such a significant jump from the old architecture to the new, something has to give if the margins for error were not factored correctly.
I suspect that Apple will provide a fix soon that will underclock the Cortex A8 core in the 3GS to eliminate some of that heat. Thankfully that's an easy solution until the hardware is reengineered a little. It should be possible to do that by maybe 10% and the average user will never notice the difference. If they're truly running it at 600Mhz, then the A8 provides a nice little mechanism to drop back to 500Mhz, or further. If they just provide a software limit so that the CPU doesn't crank up to a higher rate during high utilization, then it should take care of the problem. Yes, I have a Beagleboard which runs almost the same hardware (thou
Yes and no. The Tesla S, as well as being a "family sedan" will also be a "luxury sedan".
The article implies that there's a good possibility that there will be technology sharing between Mercedes and Tesla, which will effectively mean that if suspension development and body development both come out of Mercedes (or are assisted by Mercedes), then we have a family sedan that's a technological step forward, but in all probability positioned in the marketplace right alongside the BMW 3 series, Mercedes C-Class and Audi A4. These are the low-end of the luxury sedan line these days, and $50,000 is not unheard of... and in fact is pretty much the going rate for an optioned up 335, C350 or S4 (or any of the numerous Japanese marques that fill that niche)
I don't think it'd be unlikely to see the technology flow back the other way so we see a C-class running electric within 5 years... though BMW are betting more on diesel than electric from what I see today.
The average base family sedan today runs around $20K... add a few options and the price rapidly rockets up to $25K or even $30K. Tesla aren't making a car for "Joe and Jane Average"... yet. They've already made a car for the successful "I want a supercar" crowd... and it's a wonderful piece of technology in my opinion. Their next logical step is the premium small family sedan market currently being eaten up by the Germans and the Cadillac CTS (which is the only American car I would currently put in that class... and a damned fine competitor it is, easily a match for the Germans...). Yes, it's a tough market but one in which Tesla CAN succeed, particularly with the help of Mercedes Benz. I think it'll be awesome to see another American competitor in the market, and the fact that it'll be one that also happens to be such a technological step forward makes it even more attractive.
No, I didn't. And it had nothing to do with education, it was a matter of experience. I had traveled what I thought was a bit when I was young, around the South coast of the UK and up into Northern Ireland... but nothing in any of that experience told me the night sky was anything other than maybe a hundred stars and murk.
You miss the point; that someone who lives their entire lives under murky skies are going to look at pictures in a book of the night sky with the Milky Way plainly visible, and say "Faked... Hubble picture overlaid on silhouette of mountains..." I did... I think all of my peers did. Education is nothing without experience, and if the limit of your experience is the skies over England and Northern Ireland (as mine was, mostly... up until I was 21) then how are you ever going to experience something different?
In most of the UK, "30 minutes North" is much the same as "30 minutes South", as "30 minutes West", and so on. To get a decent view of the night sky anywhere in the UK you either need to head to Central Wales (sparsely populated) or the northernmost part of Scotland... and then hope it's not socked in with cloud.
See this post that I typed a few minutes ago. In order to hop that train, you'd have to realize there's a point to it, first.
When you can't see something, you tend to ignore it. That's human... there's no point concerning yourself with something that you can't observe from your vantage point. But live in that "reality" for long enough, and pretty soon you convince yourself that there's no need to go and look, because there really is nothing to see from the other vantage point. That's also human... it's a coping mechanism.
In Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy, the Krikkiters were an extreme example of this, but actually quite prophetic. We are becoming the Krikkiters because we are beginning to lose touch with the fact that there actually is a universe out there. I truly believe that there's an entire generation growing up right now who are going to grow up thinking the universe exists in books and TV, but aren't going to see the relevance to themselves because they somehow view themselves as apart from it... because they can't see it. I did... and not because I was taught that way, but because I had never encountered anything different for most of my life.
That presumes that people realize that driving 30 minutes North is going to make any difference. I didn't until I was in my 20's because I had lived my entire life in the UK, where your solution really isn't even an option. The cities in most of Europe are far more densely packed than they are in the USA and thus the light pollution is pretty much everywhere.
Compare the USA with the UK for light pollution... it's eye opening.
Seriously, to me this is sort of old news. Let me tell you a story;
When I was young, I grew up in a small town about 50 miles from London in the UK. We rarely left the area because we really couldn't travel much. When I was in a little older, we lived in Belfast, Northern Ireland... and finally when I was 18 I lived in London for a few years. This is significant because the first time I truly traveled outside of major metropolitan areas in my life, I was 21 and I went to Oklahoma. I was staying with friends in Chickasha, OK... and one night, I think it was my fourth night in the area we drove out to Lake Louis Burtschi, as poor college students do when they can't afford to go out and do stuff. Anyway, I recall distinctly stepping out of the car and literally had my breath taken away. My friends said I stood dead still for almost a minute, and I remember the feeling of vertigo, the feeling of depth as I stared into that starry night sky, the Milky Way clear above my head as I had seen it in books.
All my life, I had grown up seeing these pictures in books of mountains with the Milky Way shown clearly there... and all my life I had believed truly that those pictures were in some way faked to make a dramatic point. Sure, I had vaguely seen the "fuzz" of the glow of the galaxy across the sky on the clearest nights I can remember in Belfast, but never in my life before had I seen anything like it. I had never even suspected that I was able to see the sky that clearly from any vantage point on Earth except perhaps the tops of the tallest mountains... even then I doubted it looked like that. I just had no idea until I saw it first hand.
That night I stood there for the better part of 5 or 6 hours, taking in the majesty of a night sky I had never suspected I would ever see in my life, thinking that the only place I could see that would be out the window of a space shuttle (something I knew I would never do).
I'm 36 now, but that night is still vivid in my memory. It's still incredible, and still so unbelievable to me that I had the chance to see that. I have been back there since, and though it's not as clear now as it was 15 years ago, it's still an awe-inspiring sight for someone like me who has lived most of my life in suburbs. Today I live in St. Louis... we're lucky to see Betelgeuse most nights because of the light pollution of our metropolis. I know I can drive a few hours out of town and get a better view, but Missouri is too humid for a view like I got in Oklahoma.
I know how the younger people feel today... and they really don't know what they're missing. It's a sad state of affairs, and yes... one that can be rectified by getting away from the large cities if possible. But remember my example; I didn't even consider that getting away from the cities would afford me that much better a view... because I had never seen it and never encountered it. Cities are so densely packed in Britain that you'd be really hard-pressed to find a single location where you're far enough from light pollution to see that clearly. Sure, maybe the highlands of Scotland... but having been up in the highlands a few times I can say that you'd be damned lucky to get a night that wasn't overcast in most of those mountains.
I'm somewhat reminded of the people of Krikkit in Life, The Universe and Everything: They lived their entire lives surrounded by a dust cloud that obscured the night sky to the extent that it never even occurred to them that there was anything beyond that dust cloud... or even that there was a sky, as such. I think in some ways I felt when I saw the Milky Way clearly for the first time that I had spent my entire life obscured from the real night sky and as such had never even considered it's existence in the way I have since.
I can tell you that my BeagleBoard setup runs phenomenally fast on a 500/600Mhz ARM chip and 256MB of RAM. It's more than acceptable for 99.9% of all the apps I've thrown at it... be it basic web browsing, or even more complex stuff like GPS. It's silent, it's slick... and in fact the only weak point in my opinion is its reliance on SD cards for storage since they're SLOW. However, given its interfaces there's no reason you couldn't build something to interface to SATA or at least mini IDE interfaces... and the USB bus is at least 2.0.
Still, I can definitely see this going places. I bought the BeagleBoard to play with and it ended up becoming an actual usable system on my network. I am thinking of buying another one and building a car PC out of it:)
But Qualcomm's Gobi chipset purportedly supports EV-DO and HSPA in a single chipset, thus it's at least technically possible that they have done exactly as they say. It even includes GPS... so long as you have room for all the antennae (dead space behind the screen for example) then it should be a non-issue to make it into a truly "multi-radio" machine.
Hmm... wonder if Apple's been talking to Qualcomm for the next gen iPhone...;)
I'm grinding and gnashing my teeth, but not for the reasons everyone else is.
OK, I hate to defend Microsoft, but they absolutely stated this Firefox extension was to be installed in the release notes for the patch; http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=CECC62DC-96A7-4657-AF91-6383BA034EAB&displaylang=en
Also, as I recall this patch was one of those ones that requires you to click "Agree" or somesuch before installation despite setting to automatically download and install updates.
All of this crap occurs because people don't bother to read release notes any more. They would rather someone else take responsibility for their machines. Well you know what? Microsoft does just that, on a requested and as-needed basis. If you'd rather manage your own patches, then damn it... do it. But do it properly; read the bloody release notes so you know what's going on your machine. If you would rather Microsoft take that responsibility for your machine from you, then do that... but don't bitch when they do something you don't expect because you asked them to just take care of it for you.
Now, I'm not saying there's not other issues at play here; like installing a patch into a competing product and the potential ethical concerns therein... but can this not be construed as (a) a tacit approval of Firefox as a "valid" third-party browser and (b) an attempt to ensure that the user who requested that Microsoft take charge of their experience get the best experience possible?
OK, I will say before I get lynched that I don't really like this too much, myself... I don't much appreciate when people do stuff to my machines that I don't like... but I also accept that this is inevitable. If you turn ANY part of your systems management over to a third party, sometimes they're going to do things that you disagree with. This is only even vaguely newsworthy because it doesn't happen that often. At least, not as often as it could.
If you really don't like it, disable it. And if you don't want this happening again, then start doing your patching the old fashioned way; by downloading the patches by hand and installing them. But don't start crying when they do something unexpected because you didn't read the agreement you agreed to, or read the release notes to understand what the patch is doing.
This is NOT a failure of Microsoft OR Firefox. This is a failure of the user community who would rather hand off their systems management to a third party, and the "advanced" user community who just blindly install patches and updates with no attempt to research the implications of said update.
Me? I'm primarily a Mac and Gentoo user... and yes, I understand that on my Mac I'll get updates from Apple that do much the same stuff as this... but I also read the release notes that are handily downloaded with the patches... that way I know what to expect. With Gentoo, I do the same. I use Windows at work, and manage a large network of systems... and yes, this patch was deployed to my client base... and yes, the Firefox users have the.NET plugin... and yes, they can disable it if they like. In our regression testing, the plugin appeared to have little to no impact on the client system other than adding yet another add on to the list.
I used to do that... had a server at an offsite location (a company I consult for generously hosted the box for me). But I really finally got tired of maintaining the physical box, particularly as I moved more and more away from a desktop machine to a laptop... managing a physical box sitting in an office 30 miles from my home became more of a pain that I felt like dealing with.
I eventually moved to Mozy (http://www.mozy.com) which is a company that gives you a free 2GB of storage on their servers. More than enough for my critical documents. I tried it out for over a year before I eventually decided to bite the bullet and sign up for an unlimited account and then backed up everything in my user folder on my Macbook Pro to it. That's around 280GB last I checked. Yeah, OK it took a month for the initial backup to complete, but since then it's a piece of cake; all my photos, my documents and even my iTunes library are updated every time I update them. Awesome. And I never have to think about it... the program is just almost completely invisible to me and only alerts me of its presence when something goes wrong. Oh sure, occasionally I'll get a Growl alert that it's completed the backup, but more often than not it runs and completes before I even sit down to use it (I let it sit on the wireless connection and do the backup)
Of course, I still have a server at home that I do the RSYNC thing with as well... doesn't hurt to have TWO backups... though if my house burned down with my laptop and server in it, at least I'd know where all my files are:)
LOL... it happens to us all eventually;) Next thing you know it'll be adult diapers and yelling at "those darned kids":)
Seriously... this should help; http://www.chriswolf.com/?p=182
And I wish you all the best with your solution. Yes, I agree HP is often annoying, but their support for our solution has been great and easy to work with. Dell, well a few years ago I wouldn't touch a Dell server with a ten foot pole but I've had better luck recently with our European offices that insist on Dell (at least until our Corporate folks decide to come down on them... it's coming...). Dell have really upped their game in the last 18 months and are really a contender now in the server space. However, I still find HP to be better because a single image with the latest drivers will often boot effectively unmodified even on 3-4 year old hardware. That's quite handy in an environment where our systems are bought with 5 year warranties and are kept for every minute of those five years!:)
You know, that's an excellent idea if your SAN is capable... not all are. Our current production SAN is an HP EVA 4200... if we had a 4400 we could do it, but with the older 4200 it doesn't even have a direct network connection of its own; instead it has a dedicated storage server for managing the SAN (actually a DL380 running Windows Storage Server).
The ESXi HCL is a lot tighter than ESX, but I've had few problems so long as I stick with the "common" solutions. I buy almost exclusively HP servers for virtualization since (a) they're damned nice systems for a decent price and (b) they ship a customised ESXi CD that has all of the hardware drivers and agents for their entire line. The fact that their hardware drivers often support a VERY long list of legacy hardware in a single driver really helps, too. Dell has similar solutions, but I've had difficulty with two identically named controllers requiring completely different drivers because of different chipsets. Really annoying.
Another nice thing with the flash based boot is that a USB key is cheap... and the HP servers have internal USB slots just for that purpose.
My general feeling on virtualization though is that when you're rolling out a VM solution, then you're far better served buying hardware from a big name... that's on the HCL. The reason for that is simply that it's far more "supportable", and if something goes wrong you can really just go at most two places to get that support; the hardware vendor and VMware. Yes, it costs a little more, but I'd much rather spend the extra grand or so to have a box that I can make a phonecall and have a piece of hardware replaced for three years (standard warranty on HP servers) without fuss or hassle. It means I can focus on providing my solutions to my end users instead of fighting hardware issues. YMMV... but it makes me feel better:)
Yes. It's quite trivial, actually and I seem to recall there's a VMware whitepaper on it.
OK, it's ESXi, not ESX... but the difference is small enough to make no odds. Oh, and on the flip side of that, I do find it easier to have ESXi on an internal flash in case my PXE server is down. I would host it virtually and on HA if it weren't for the fact that I have that whole "chicken and egg" problem:D
This is one reason I run Exchange 2007 with a clustered PHYSICAL mailbox server, and all the CAS and HT roles I run on virtual machines. I don't run database type apps on VMware for exactly these reasons... I am a big VMware supporter, but I also specify for our big apps that we use big SQL and Exchange clusters for HA... not VMware. Yes, it's a bit more expensive that way, but our Exchange cluster now hasn't been "down" in over a year, despite the fact that each node gets patched once a month and rebooted. My users love it:)
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Seconded. Plus, a spirited ride on your average sportbike (which, incidentally most of them weigh north of 400lbs these days) can actually give you a pretty decent upper-body workout from the leaning, control and the constant movement in it.
It's funny... there's this attitude that riding a motorcycle is easy but it's coming from people who've never actually ridden one. I ride one most days during the year, even down to a few degrees above freezing (or sometimes below if there's no ice on the road) and love the fact that it gives me a feeling of exhilaration that my car just doesn't and allows me to do a little spirited riding and thus get a little bit of exercise before I melt into my cubicle for the day :)
Oh, and on-topic... yeah, I've ridden a Segway before. It was interesting, but only from a purely technological perspective. It's too big to be useful on the sidewalks of most cities I've ever been in, and too slow to actually do anything useful like... ooh, I dunno... go somewhere? Hell, if I even want to run to the store for a few small items I'd actually be far more likely to take my motorbike because between a backpack and my panniers (I ride a Kawasaki Concours 14) I can carry a hell of a lot more stuff than the Segway. So where's the point, again?
Ya know, I think it would be awesome if in the first episode of the new series there was going to be a scene with all the characters without mouths for some oddball reason. Call it a quick "reference" for all the geeks who followed this story :)
As I recall, touchpads date back to the 1980's in actual usage on Apollo computers. How exactly is this patent in any way novel?
Sorry, I don't see this at all. Yes, I use Mozy, so I'm a little biased but if I had seen no use-case scenarios where it was helpful I probably wouldn't.
I pay for an unlimited account... there's currently about 90GB of data up there that I can think of... and yes, I've requested a restore on more than one occasion. Hell, there was a time I found I needed a particular file while I was out in Denver off my personal laptop which I didn't have with me (since it was a business trip). Yes, I can VPN into my home systems, but I also knew my laptop was closed and therefore asleep at home. I jumped onto Mozy and "restored" the file to my work laptop within 20 minutes at the hotel, modified it, used it, and copied it back to my personal laptop when I got home.
And bandwidth / internet limits? Uhm... OK... if you insist. Today is the 6th of July. Being a parent of two kids meant I took a lot of photographs on Saturday of my kids enjoying the day... and some video. Sync'ed to iPhoto on Saturday and then just left my laptop running while ~4GB of pictures got uploaded to Mozy. It's damned nice to know all that data is up there in the event I ever lost it. Yes, I also backup my critical files to a file server at home via rsync, but I find that less and less a necessity since Mozy has fulfilled my backup needs for some time. Oh yeah, and I periodically take an image backup of my laptop so that I can restore the entire system to a point in time... I just fire up Carbon Copy Cloner, plug in my Drobo and go out for the day :)
I am the exception to the rule I think; I keep LOTS of backups. But still, my point still stands; that Mozy and other online services are damned good value and don't suffer from the perceived problems that you mention... at least not in my experience.
What's wrong with an "image" choice?
My choice to buy a BMW 335i is as much driven by image as it is my passion for driving fast family saloons. I could buy an Honda Accord for half the money and still get within a second or two 1/4 mile... but where the hell would the fun be in that? It's boring... it's got numb handling and a respectable but unremarkable V6 engine. It could haul my family around just as well as the 335i, but I am going to choose the 335i or one of its competitors because I like the way it drives... but also because I love the way it looks (with the M sport package, anyway). I also love the fact that (from an image perspective) it's a twin-turbo six-cylinder 300hp monster in stock form, and can be modified with $1500 of electronics to do ~430hp.
YMMV... and this is all IMNSHO :)
Maybe for some... but for me not so much.
I currently drive an aging BMW 330i... which has done me sterling service, but is really getting long in the tooth and over 100K miles. Sooner or later I'm going to have to replace it and I'm looking possibly at next year. As a result, I'm looking at a new car, and I'm quite set on a nice one... a new one. At the moment I'm looking very seriously at a BMW 335i or Mercedes C350. Believe it or not, Audi priced themselves out of the market because they provide (in my opinion) just not enough car for the money spent.
So what am I looking to spend? Funnily enough... right at $50,000. That equals monthly payments with a modest down payment of about $750 a month, give or take over five years. To me, that's doable.
I'm not trying to brag about my income... I earn a decent income but am by no means rich. My salary hasn't broken the magical six figure mark, and probably won't any time soon, but I still put this Model S in the realms of affordability because the only two things I do on credit are my mortgage and one car payment at a time... never more than that. No credit cards... live on cash.
So, here we have an American-built sedan that's in the $50,000 range... does sub 6-second 0-60, and as a bonus is a real technological tour de force. No, it won't hang with the 335i or C350 in the quarter... in fact it might but it'll run out of charge in an hurry. But still, the Model S becomes an extremely compelling American car... the only one I would really give a serious look (yes, I drove the Cadillac CTS and while it was a good car it didn't fit "me"). I like it... it has that Aston Martin / Maserati Quattroporte look that I love... a panorama roof (see the pics) and to boot is a zero emissions perfect commuting / light touring car. Wow. For $50,000?
All those who complain about range... so what? How often do you really drive more than 200 miles at a sitting? I can honestly say that my AVERAGE per day is about 40 miles... max. Maybe 50, tops on a day I go to lunch with my colleagues. I drive more than 200 miles maybe twice or three times a year to Chicago and / or Peoria. For that... I have my Kawasaki Concours 14 if I feel like running on two wheels and solo... or I can rent a car either one-way or return and not worry about it. Hell, to Chicago I can get the train and sleep during the trip.
I for one wish Tesla the best of luck. If my purchase I plan for next year ends up pushed back to 2011, then a quick trip to California to drive the S might be in the cards instead of my currently planned favourite; the 335i (which is an intoxicating piece of engineering, no mistake, there). The only thing I'd miss is I plan a European Delivery of the Bimmer, with a quick jaunt over the Alps via the Stelvio Pass to spend a week in Northern Italy. But if I end up choosing a Tesla S, then maybe I can still do it by renting a motorcycle instead :) I'd be able to with my gas savings... though my electricity bill will be intriguing. ;)
Unfortunately you also missed the critical part of that paragraph; that I have too much invested in the WinMo platform over the last decade to really switch at the moment. To re-code (or have re-coded) the custom applications I have installed would be FAR more expensive than just the $100 cost of joining the developer program. At the moment, it's just not worth it.
Now, if more of my customers used iPhones, maybe... but so many of them are tied to Microsoft software (Exchange, Office and so forth) that they figure they may as well have a Windows phone. Their thinking may not be totally correct, but that's unfortunately life in the Corporate world. Besides, still not convinced that the iPhone is going to save the world ;)
A lot of modern smartphones suffer these exact problems because of the push for more and more features. Basically, a feature add will add power draw, and will also tend to add CPU usage as the applications to run these new features crank up the utilization.
I don't have an iPhone... I have too much invested in the Windows Mobile platform dating back almost a decade to really migrate at this point (plus, I write some of my own little applets and upload to my phone all the time... can't do that with the iPhone without jailbreaking). However, I DO currently have an HTC Touch Pro, my previous device being an HTC Tilt. The majority of the time, the phone is excellent; it runs cool, it does exactly what I want when I want and doesn't have too many horribly nefarious bugs, though much of that probably has to do with the custom ROM I flashed to it. But if I start activating devices such as GPS, WiFi and other features like that it sometimes shocks me how hot the phone will get. Particularly if I'm using, say Google Maps as a GPS application.
Google Maps will turn on my GPS antenna, and then will start pulling data using my 3G connection (I have traffic turned on, too). Both of these add significant power draw and heat generation, and the GM app itself will tend to crank up the CPU. Because of the draw, and because most of the time I only use these functions together in the car I plug my phone into my car charger. But you know what? Then the screen stays on... more heat. Literally, my phone can get to the point where I'd be really uncomfortable holding that thing up to my ear... thank for Bluetooth headsets! Even if I skip Google Maps and use TomTom Mobile, it forces the screen to stay on so again the battery life goes into the toilet and I end up with a rather nice hand warmer on cold days.
Does it concern me? A little. I get concerned that this heat is going to shorten the life of my device significantly, but on the flip side I'm enough of a phone geek I tend to trade out my phones every couple of years anyway to get the "latest and greatest". Also, the Touch Pro has not shown any significant signs of being a problem child... it all works.
The Touch Pro has been pretty well engineered by HTC; they design a LOT of handsets for a lot of different markets. As a result, their experience in engineering these kind of form factors is really good. Their smartphone devices will dissipate heat quite well, and be none the worse for wear. My old Tilt still works as well as the day I bought it ~3 or 4 years ago, except that it's been dropped quite a number of times. Apple's problem is that they really don't have that experience, and as such they DO make mistakes with heat dissipation and things like that in a small form factor like the iPhone. They've done it before; their focus on aesthetics often takes over from the engineering portion... and while I know Apple has some phenomenal engineers, there's no replacement for experience. I think the engineering margins they built into the 3GS were just too tight for such a large CPU bump and general hardware bump. Everyone loves the fact that Apple used the same case (almost) for the 3GS... which is great for all those dock-equipped things that were designed for the 3G... but when you make such a significant jump from the old architecture to the new, something has to give if the margins for error were not factored correctly.
I suspect that Apple will provide a fix soon that will underclock the Cortex A8 core in the 3GS to eliminate some of that heat. Thankfully that's an easy solution until the hardware is reengineered a little. It should be possible to do that by maybe 10% and the average user will never notice the difference. If they're truly running it at 600Mhz, then the A8 provides a nice little mechanism to drop back to 500Mhz, or further. If they just provide a software limit so that the CPU doesn't crank up to a higher rate during high utilization, then it should take care of the problem. Yes, I have a Beagleboard which runs almost the same hardware (thou
So... a lot like Chicago, then?
Yes and no. The Tesla S, as well as being a "family sedan" will also be a "luxury sedan".
The article implies that there's a good possibility that there will be technology sharing between Mercedes and Tesla, which will effectively mean that if suspension development and body development both come out of Mercedes (or are assisted by Mercedes), then we have a family sedan that's a technological step forward, but in all probability positioned in the marketplace right alongside the BMW 3 series, Mercedes C-Class and Audi A4. These are the low-end of the luxury sedan line these days, and $50,000 is not unheard of... and in fact is pretty much the going rate for an optioned up 335, C350 or S4 (or any of the numerous Japanese marques that fill that niche)
I don't think it'd be unlikely to see the technology flow back the other way so we see a C-class running electric within 5 years... though BMW are betting more on diesel than electric from what I see today.
The average base family sedan today runs around $20K... add a few options and the price rapidly rockets up to $25K or even $30K. Tesla aren't making a car for "Joe and Jane Average"... yet. They've already made a car for the successful "I want a supercar" crowd... and it's a wonderful piece of technology in my opinion. Their next logical step is the premium small family sedan market currently being eaten up by the Germans and the Cadillac CTS (which is the only American car I would currently put in that class... and a damned fine competitor it is, easily a match for the Germans...). Yes, it's a tough market but one in which Tesla CAN succeed, particularly with the help of Mercedes Benz. I think it'll be awesome to see another American competitor in the market, and the fact that it'll be one that also happens to be such a technological step forward makes it even more attractive.
No, I didn't. And it had nothing to do with education, it was a matter of experience. I had traveled what I thought was a bit when I was young, around the South coast of the UK and up into Northern Ireland... but nothing in any of that experience told me the night sky was anything other than maybe a hundred stars and murk.
You miss the point; that someone who lives their entire lives under murky skies are going to look at pictures in a book of the night sky with the Milky Way plainly visible, and say "Faked... Hubble picture overlaid on silhouette of mountains..." I did... I think all of my peers did. Education is nothing without experience, and if the limit of your experience is the skies over England and Northern Ireland (as mine was, mostly... up until I was 21) then how are you ever going to experience something different?
In most of the UK, "30 minutes North" is much the same as "30 minutes South", as "30 minutes West", and so on. To get a decent view of the night sky anywhere in the UK you either need to head to Central Wales (sparsely populated) or the northernmost part of Scotland... and then hope it's not socked in with cloud.
See this post that I typed a few minutes ago. In order to hop that train, you'd have to realize there's a point to it, first.
When you can't see something, you tend to ignore it. That's human... there's no point concerning yourself with something that you can't observe from your vantage point. But live in that "reality" for long enough, and pretty soon you convince yourself that there's no need to go and look, because there really is nothing to see from the other vantage point. That's also human... it's a coping mechanism.
In Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy, the Krikkiters were an extreme example of this, but actually quite prophetic. We are becoming the Krikkiters because we are beginning to lose touch with the fact that there actually is a universe out there. I truly believe that there's an entire generation growing up right now who are going to grow up thinking the universe exists in books and TV, but aren't going to see the relevance to themselves because they somehow view themselves as apart from it... because they can't see it. I did... and not because I was taught that way, but because I had never encountered anything different for most of my life.
That presumes that people realize that driving 30 minutes North is going to make any difference. I didn't until I was in my 20's because I had lived my entire life in the UK, where your solution really isn't even an option. The cities in most of Europe are far more densely packed than they are in the USA and thus the light pollution is pretty much everywhere.
Compare the USA with the UK for light pollution... it's eye opening.
Seriously, to me this is sort of old news. Let me tell you a story;
When I was young, I grew up in a small town about 50 miles from London in the UK. We rarely left the area because we really couldn't travel much. When I was in a little older, we lived in Belfast, Northern Ireland... and finally when I was 18 I lived in London for a few years. This is significant because the first time I truly traveled outside of major metropolitan areas in my life, I was 21 and I went to Oklahoma. I was staying with friends in Chickasha, OK... and one night, I think it was my fourth night in the area we drove out to Lake Louis Burtschi, as poor college students do when they can't afford to go out and do stuff. Anyway, I recall distinctly stepping out of the car and literally had my breath taken away. My friends said I stood dead still for almost a minute, and I remember the feeling of vertigo, the feeling of depth as I stared into that starry night sky, the Milky Way clear above my head as I had seen it in books.
All my life, I had grown up seeing these pictures in books of mountains with the Milky Way shown clearly there... and all my life I had believed truly that those pictures were in some way faked to make a dramatic point. Sure, I had vaguely seen the "fuzz" of the glow of the galaxy across the sky on the clearest nights I can remember in Belfast, but never in my life before had I seen anything like it. I had never even suspected that I was able to see the sky that clearly from any vantage point on Earth except perhaps the tops of the tallest mountains... even then I doubted it looked like that. I just had no idea until I saw it first hand.
That night I stood there for the better part of 5 or 6 hours, taking in the majesty of a night sky I had never suspected I would ever see in my life, thinking that the only place I could see that would be out the window of a space shuttle (something I knew I would never do).
I'm 36 now, but that night is still vivid in my memory. It's still incredible, and still so unbelievable to me that I had the chance to see that. I have been back there since, and though it's not as clear now as it was 15 years ago, it's still an awe-inspiring sight for someone like me who has lived most of my life in suburbs. Today I live in St. Louis... we're lucky to see Betelgeuse most nights because of the light pollution of our metropolis. I know I can drive a few hours out of town and get a better view, but Missouri is too humid for a view like I got in Oklahoma.
I know how the younger people feel today... and they really don't know what they're missing. It's a sad state of affairs, and yes... one that can be rectified by getting away from the large cities if possible. But remember my example; I didn't even consider that getting away from the cities would afford me that much better a view... because I had never seen it and never encountered it. Cities are so densely packed in Britain that you'd be really hard-pressed to find a single location where you're far enough from light pollution to see that clearly. Sure, maybe the highlands of Scotland... but having been up in the highlands a few times I can say that you'd be damned lucky to get a night that wasn't overcast in most of those mountains.
I'm somewhat reminded of the people of Krikkit in Life, The Universe and Everything: They lived their entire lives surrounded by a dust cloud that obscured the night sky to the extent that it never even occurred to them that there was anything beyond that dust cloud... or even that there was a sky, as such. I think in some ways I felt when I saw the Milky Way clearly for the first time that I had spent my entire life obscured from the real night sky and as such had never even considered it's existence in the way I have since.
I can tell you that my BeagleBoard setup runs phenomenally fast on a 500/600Mhz ARM chip and 256MB of RAM. It's more than acceptable for 99.9% of all the apps I've thrown at it... be it basic web browsing, or even more complex stuff like GPS. It's silent, it's slick... and in fact the only weak point in my opinion is its reliance on SD cards for storage since they're SLOW. However, given its interfaces there's no reason you couldn't build something to interface to SATA or at least mini IDE interfaces... and the USB bus is at least 2.0.
Still, I can definitely see this going places. I bought the BeagleBoard to play with and it ended up becoming an actual usable system on my network. I am thinking of buying another one and building a car PC out of it :)
But Qualcomm's Gobi chipset purportedly supports EV-DO and HSPA in a single chipset, thus it's at least technically possible that they have done exactly as they say. It even includes GPS... so long as you have room for all the antennae (dead space behind the screen for example) then it should be a non-issue to make it into a truly "multi-radio" machine.
Hmm... wonder if Apple's been talking to Qualcomm for the next gen iPhone... ;)
I sit corrected... but my point stands.
I just classify Scientology as entertainment... problem solved :)
I'm grinding and gnashing my teeth, but not for the reasons everyone else is.
OK, I hate to defend Microsoft, but they absolutely stated this Firefox extension was to be installed in the release notes for the patch; http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=CECC62DC-96A7-4657-AF91-6383BA034EAB&displaylang=en
Also, as I recall this patch was one of those ones that requires you to click "Agree" or somesuch before installation despite setting to automatically download and install updates.
All of this crap occurs because people don't bother to read release notes any more. They would rather someone else take responsibility for their machines. Well you know what? Microsoft does just that, on a requested and as-needed basis. If you'd rather manage your own patches, then damn it... do it. But do it properly; read the bloody release notes so you know what's going on your machine. If you would rather Microsoft take that responsibility for your machine from you, then do that... but don't bitch when they do something you don't expect because you asked them to just take care of it for you.
Now, I'm not saying there's not other issues at play here; like installing a patch into a competing product and the potential ethical concerns therein... but can this not be construed as (a) a tacit approval of Firefox as a "valid" third-party browser and (b) an attempt to ensure that the user who requested that Microsoft take charge of their experience get the best experience possible?
OK, I will say before I get lynched that I don't really like this too much, myself... I don't much appreciate when people do stuff to my machines that I don't like... but I also accept that this is inevitable. If you turn ANY part of your systems management over to a third party, sometimes they're going to do things that you disagree with. This is only even vaguely newsworthy because it doesn't happen that often. At least, not as often as it could.
If you really don't like it, disable it. And if you don't want this happening again, then start doing your patching the old fashioned way; by downloading the patches by hand and installing them. But don't start crying when they do something unexpected because you didn't read the agreement you agreed to, or read the release notes to understand what the patch is doing.
This is NOT a failure of Microsoft OR Firefox. This is a failure of the user community who would rather hand off their systems management to a third party, and the "advanced" user community who just blindly install patches and updates with no attempt to research the implications of said update.
Me? I'm primarily a Mac and Gentoo user... and yes, I understand that on my Mac I'll get updates from Apple that do much the same stuff as this... but I also read the release notes that are handily downloaded with the patches... that way I know what to expect. With Gentoo, I do the same. I use Windows at work, and manage a large network of systems... and yes, this patch was deployed to my client base... and yes, the Firefox users have the .NET plugin... and yes, they can disable it if they like. In our regression testing, the plugin appeared to have little to no impact on the client system other than adding yet another add on to the list.
I used to do that... had a server at an offsite location (a company I consult for generously hosted the box for me). But I really finally got tired of maintaining the physical box, particularly as I moved more and more away from a desktop machine to a laptop... managing a physical box sitting in an office 30 miles from my home became more of a pain that I felt like dealing with.
I eventually moved to Mozy (http://www.mozy.com) which is a company that gives you a free 2GB of storage on their servers. More than enough for my critical documents. I tried it out for over a year before I eventually decided to bite the bullet and sign up for an unlimited account and then backed up everything in my user folder on my Macbook Pro to it. That's around 280GB last I checked. Yeah, OK it took a month for the initial backup to complete, but since then it's a piece of cake; all my photos, my documents and even my iTunes library are updated every time I update them. Awesome. And I never have to think about it... the program is just almost completely invisible to me and only alerts me of its presence when something goes wrong. Oh sure, occasionally I'll get a Growl alert that it's completed the backup, but more often than not it runs and completes before I even sit down to use it (I let it sit on the wireless connection and do the backup)
Of course, I still have a server at home that I do the RSYNC thing with as well... doesn't hurt to have TWO backups... though if my house burned down with my laptop and server in it, at least I'd know where all my files are :)
I really don't understand... why would tubes need guard rails?
LOL... it happens to us all eventually ;) Next thing you know it'll be adult diapers and yelling at "those darned kids" :)
Seriously... this should help; http://www.chriswolf.com/?p=182
And I wish you all the best with your solution. Yes, I agree HP is often annoying, but their support for our solution has been great and easy to work with. Dell, well a few years ago I wouldn't touch a Dell server with a ten foot pole but I've had better luck recently with our European offices that insist on Dell (at least until our Corporate folks decide to come down on them... it's coming...). Dell have really upped their game in the last 18 months and are really a contender now in the server space. However, I still find HP to be better because a single image with the latest drivers will often boot effectively unmodified even on 3-4 year old hardware. That's quite handy in an environment where our systems are bought with 5 year warranties and are kept for every minute of those five years! :)
You know, that's an excellent idea if your SAN is capable... not all are. Our current production SAN is an HP EVA 4200... if we had a 4400 we could do it, but with the older 4200 it doesn't even have a direct network connection of its own; instead it has a dedicated storage server for managing the SAN (actually a DL380 running Windows Storage Server).
The ESXi HCL is a lot tighter than ESX, but I've had few problems so long as I stick with the "common" solutions. I buy almost exclusively HP servers for virtualization since (a) they're damned nice systems for a decent price and (b) they ship a customised ESXi CD that has all of the hardware drivers and agents for their entire line. The fact that their hardware drivers often support a VERY long list of legacy hardware in a single driver really helps, too. Dell has similar solutions, but I've had difficulty with two identically named controllers requiring completely different drivers because of different chipsets. Really annoying.
Another nice thing with the flash based boot is that a USB key is cheap... and the HP servers have internal USB slots just for that purpose.
My general feeling on virtualization though is that when you're rolling out a VM solution, then you're far better served buying hardware from a big name... that's on the HCL. The reason for that is simply that it's far more "supportable", and if something goes wrong you can really just go at most two places to get that support; the hardware vendor and VMware. Yes, it costs a little more, but I'd much rather spend the extra grand or so to have a box that I can make a phonecall and have a piece of hardware replaced for three years (standard warranty on HP servers) without fuss or hassle. It means I can focus on providing my solutions to my end users instead of fighting hardware issues. YMMV... but it makes me feel better :)
Yes. It's quite trivial, actually and I seem to recall there's a VMware whitepaper on it.
OK, it's ESXi, not ESX... but the difference is small enough to make no odds. Oh, and on the flip side of that, I do find it easier to have ESXi on an internal flash in case my PXE server is down. I would host it virtually and on HA if it weren't for the fact that I have that whole "chicken and egg" problem :D
This is one reason I run Exchange 2007 with a clustered PHYSICAL mailbox server, and all the CAS and HT roles I run on virtual machines. I don't run database type apps on VMware for exactly these reasons... I am a big VMware supporter, but I also specify for our big apps that we use big SQL and Exchange clusters for HA... not VMware. Yes, it's a bit more expensive that way, but our Exchange cluster now hasn't been "down" in over a year, despite the fact that each node gets patched once a month and rebooted. My users love it :)