No doubt Nicira's Network Virtualization Platform will hurt Cisco unit sales now and in the immediate future. Premium Cisco h/w prices will be ending real soon. At least with non-hypervisor-aware models. With VMware's recent acquisition of Nicira, and Cisco expanding its partnership with Citrix, say goodby to the VMware/Cisco alliance. SDNs will virtualize most, if not all, gigantic data centers and enterprise networks in short order. But who will dominate the transition?. Regardless, I wouldn't bet against Cisco's ability to survive and thrive through these coming changes. And I don't think you should stop studying for your CCIE, it that's something you're doing. You should find out as much as you can about Nicira's SDN controller s/w.
VMware is making some bold but good moves here. I wonder why the damn day traders and insiders have recently abandoned VMW stock. One market analyst writes an article about "the server virtualization market being saturated" and they panic and they all bail out. Very very tricky of you, you god damned short-term volatility creating bastards with your inside tips from column writing analysts.
Romney is surrounding himself with Bush neocons and you know a Romney administration would staff key cabinet positions with them. And he doesn't know anything about foreign policy, and couldn't care less about earth sciences - specifically environmental science. No, he would leave all that to neocons and big oil construction companies to deal with. Shock & awe, bombing runs, land wars, fear in the form of colorful terror warning labels, etc. More war (non-infrastructure investment) debt that does nothing good for the US economy, except grab more oil at the high cost of war. The only "good thing" for you Slashdotters are Romney's promised high bracket tax cuts. And if you're a one issue voter that'd be it. Otherwise, you know better. So the question is: get bigger tax returns and fuck-up middle easterners and the earth's biosphere, or not?
If a web browser serves as a front-end to all of a large corporation's apps, I would recommend the $250ish Google Chromebooks over Win8. But only because Win8 UI is ridiculously confusing & alien to Windows users. Win8 will only accelerate enterprise IT to look elsewhere, including Google's low cost Chromebooks for its users. Microsoft should have continued refining the desktop UI, like Win7 did - Hint: should've kept desktop PC/Workstations and Laptops in mind as a priority, should've added some of the best desktop features from Linux, and kept touchscreen tablet & monitor features as a secondary amenity - not a priority. Win8 makes it appear Microsoft is in a rush to abandon Intel & AMD and PC/Workstations in general. Microsoft's Win8 is unfriendly with regards to desktop workstation user experience, and is a waste of time and money when compared to alternatives (front-ends) from Google. Microsoft had better support Win7 for the same length of time it supported WindowsXP. I won't recommend Win8 to any enterprise network.
Republicans have become science-suppressors, not the democrats. To equate the two parties in this manner is a false equivalency. Romney made it clear: he and the neocons don't give a shit about concerns coming from earth sciences. I have a problem with appointing industry lobbyists with religious nutballs that actually think Earth is a temporary testing ground for some binary test. This effectively grants permission for offending corporations to go nuts with reckless destructive processes unimpeded by responsible, rational planning.
Government was designed to protect its citizens from enemies, both foreign and domestic. When big corporations have their way with our federally protected lands, sea & air, a government agency, the dept. of the interior (in this case) was designed to ensure any management & distribution of these scarce and precious resources be done in a responsible way or not at all. But when you have an administration that cynically appoints big-oil, lumber, cattle, & coal lobbyists along with religious wackos into top positions, including #1 & #2, then things fall apart and you get reckless wild-west mentality that benefits a very narrow bunch of companies at the expense of everyone else, including future generations. Then what do you do? You blame government. That's the Koch Brothers way. Its how you wind up with people voting against their own interests with a passion. But its destructive both near-term and long-term for this country, for this world's finely tuned biosphere, and its immediate future. This world with its comfortable evolved biosphere is all there is for humanity. And humanity cannot duplicate it any meaningful way, any time soon.
What is that with Americans playing on the person all the time?
In Holland, we have had politicians who were publicly known to visit SM dungeons and black rooms. Are publicly gay. Or just unmarried, like our current prime minister. And no-one, literally no-one, makes a fuzz out of that.
Any debate will be about political issues. The worst accusations regarding personal lifes is about possible activist behaviour in the past. Working for greenpeace for example, like the current leader of the big labour party who has been arrested at least 10 times due to his activist history.
So.. I think this is a good thing. I'm not seeing how a politicians personal life, sexlife, hobbies, children, wife or man, has anything to do with the quality of the person as politician, and the message he or she brings. They are ordinary humans just like you and me with human desires, emotions and errors.
So, why with 'you' it is an issue if a politician plays a rogue in WoW? I wouldn't know, and have no issue with it myself untill she ganks me. If any, it only proves she's just as human as the 2 million other rogues around in this game, and is in for some fun and entertainment at a time, proving she's got a modern youthful mind..
2 cents from over the atlantic.
They're treated like babies and things are highly censored in a strange way. Something to do with empire maintenance, ya know... keep em fat, happy, ignorant & uninformed. Still, I do like Marshall Dillon in the old b&w episodes.
That's another title we see here once every [n] months. I still work on what I used to call a mainframe ("Enterprise Server", or "Big iron", or "my baby") and I expect to still be using a PC for many years.
Slow news day at Slashdot HQ? I bet we see the "can anyone be a programmer or does it take special skills" one soon. (Oh, wait...)
I hope its hype and nothing more, but it seems different this time, ie. dwindling unit sales, s/w piracy, difficulty of PC manufacturers to remain barely profitable. What applications really drove the explosive growth of personal computers anyway? Email, web, word processing, spreadsheets, CAD, forums, IRC, compilers/assemblers, and computer games. All those apps, with the exception of CAD, and the most graphics-intensive online/offline computer games are mostly F2P in the "cloud". For those cloud apps, h/w that can run a web browser is the minimum requirement, so the PC is overkill in that case. Much smaller, less energy intensive, and dumber devices like smartphones and tablets will suffice for those apps. Still need fast 3D graphics accelerators, i/o ports for large HD monitors & good qwerty keyboards though. People saying these are ancient fossil dinosaurs for i/o that need to go instinct are wrong, often moronic.
IIRC Why do the Chicken Littles always seem to disappear when their predictions fail, yet again, to come true? When there's a drought or a heat wave, they're always the first to jump in front of the mic screaming "Global warming--Weesa all gonna die!!!." When it's flooding or mild--nowhere to be found. Oil well rupture, "End of the World! Run for your lives!" Rupture turns out to not have much of an effect at all--hey, where did they go?
Guess they're off preparing for the next disaster that's going to destroy us all.
Thousands if not tens of thousands big & small, fish, birds, dolphins, seals, sea-turtles, coral reefs, sea-lions, walruses, everything that comes into contact with the 170M+ gallons of oil that leaked from the ruptured BP Gulf oil well due to irresponsible reckless idiots at BP & Deepwater drilling, you DF wannabe lobbyist.
There's something in the proverbial water that's effectively dumbing down huge swaths of the general populous when it comes to political worldviews overwriting reality. A few observations: What are the sources of their information? I heard from a friend of a friend that...; I heard on the radio...; I read in a magazine...; I saw in the news...; I read on the Internet...
What passes for "free press" these days - Radio, TV/Cable, online blogs, magazines, are virtually all for-profit commercial organizations heavily funded by advertisers and commercial foundations. Every person, every organization is corruptible - given the right price and/or level of coercion.
It is inevitable, in our modus operandi, that the richest most powerful commercial interests become embedded in the general population's psyche as something "good". Just watch/read some BP, Chevron, Exxon/Mobile commercials/advertisements. Its the echo chamber in action.
Hypocritical religious fantacism has wrapped itself around the GOP. These poeple don't give a damn about this world. Its all about the next world with them. That's why the U.S. cannot afford to have these crazy people in foreign affairs, with trigger-happy fingers on the big red button, nor should they ever again run agencies such as the Dept. of the Interior.
We evolved from primordial goo; were the first to evolve a self-aware intellect that allowed us to dominate all species and become a geophysical force that now threatens its own existence by short-sighted foolishness. Countless non-human sentient beings, with complex nervous systems, with brains, have suffered unspeakable torturous existence, and demise, due to human activity, most notably the harvested factory farm animals to feed our rapidly growing, expanding biomass.
From science, with its observations, experiments, hypothesis & assertions, people with empathy want to preserve humanity's existence well into the future by preserving a biosphere with robust intact ecosystems, while at the same time, minimizing suffering of all lifeforms.
From fanatical evangelical theologies, people apparently selfishly only care for their (hypothetical) next world "heaven". To them, this world, with all its pressing issues means nothing. These useless bastards need to GTFO of the way of progress. We all have less and less time to keep fucking around.
The only "innovation" going on in "the cloud" is the commoditization of routing/switching functions via SDNs (what Google & Nicira are doing). The cloud+tablet hype is an obvious swing back to a centralized model for corporate IT - only this time data centers are primarily accessed via public Internet pipes vs. private broadband. Downsides include loss of robust internally controlled data security and privacy, and increasing dependance upon ISPs and 3rd-party massive arrays of VMs. Whatever threats each of those high-profile entities are exposed to, ie. govts.and other criminal organizations infiltrating & snooping, so to will you and your company be equally visible and vulnerable. It would be very unfortunate if a robust desktop PC marketplace succumbs to cloud-dependent iPad-like dumb terminals. Don't let desktop PCs disappear.
What are your opinions on "Consumer Report" reviews? Are they legit to any degree? I'm trying to find a dependable central A/C & heating package. Every damn review out there is well written astroturf lies. After reading around a dozen positive reviews for a particular brand/model, I almost bought it, but luckily, I ran across a very negative, very detailed, review. Whether or not that one negative review was legit or from a competitor, I truly could not discern. It just seemed like a real dissatisfied customer warning others not to fall for a piece of expensive high-maintenance garbage . So I kept looking. Still am.
I anticipate that we will see Metro and the touchscreen UI concept for Desktops go by the wayside within two years. Win8 will get patched to remove the Metro UI (With Metro Apps running in non-fullscreen windows instead) the Start button and Start menu will return and that will be the end of this abortive experiment in "blended" UIs.
If that happens, Microsoft is finished in the consumer space. I don't think they are willing to lose consumer. They remember far too well how they beat IBM, Unisys and DEC for the enterprise desktop.
IMO, this is about a gamble Microsoft, under Ballmer, is taking by betting traditional PC desktops are obsolete and on their way out as a front-end to "cloud" apps & data. Regardless where the actual apps & data wind up residing, I prefer powerful PC/Workstations that can function equally proficient either online or offline, for all things non-trivial. I like giant HD monitors, a great tactile keyboard, decent mouse/trackball/pen tablet input devices. Tablets do not replace any of that in any way. I do not want to have to be constantly online to get anything done. I don't want to be forced to type on lame, error-prone touch-screen virtual keyboards. At home, I want a powerhouse desktop PC to handle video & photo editing, diagrams/drawing, presentations, playing games, & messing around with personal coding projects.
According to Oracle, the desktop OS should've died over a decade ago and been replaced with dumb terminals running a web browser exclusively. If Ballmer can't adjust the behemoth's current course of foolishly chasing Google/Amazon/Apple into Cloud hype in 3rd place, and prioritize core MS strengths (desktop & server OS, MS Office) MS deserves to slam into that iceberg dead ahead.
I want to know, in a nutshell, will your administration be more likely to make decisions, and form policies, based on scientific realities, or on industry funded pseudoscience?
Press for this debate loudly. All too often, scientists in general, are too polite, too subdued, whereas brash know-it-all MBAs & Lawyers can't restrain themselves & their abilities to whip up a crowd for obfuscated, short-sighted, often selfish (greedy) counterproductive reasons.
It is pathetic, the progress science-deniers/ detractors have made in the public consciousness in areas that truly matter: habitat destruction, green house gases, marine pollution, stratospheric ozone depletion, aka collectively screwing around with the global nitrogen cycle.
Niven and Lucas make great space operas. But we have to admit to some limitations. Come back in a few million years, and whatever species have descended from us may have a different opinion. But us? No, we have no chance.
We are hardwired for optimism, for better and for worse. And future milestone breakthroughs are very hard to predict. Some predict an accurate simulation of the human brain is only several years away. Strong AI shouldn't be too far off after that. Strong AI will expand the sphere of whats possible, technologically. But we human beings are most defintely very primitive. IMO, we have never possessed the type of ethical wisdom, nor moral courage that would allow our species to survive well into the future. As it is, the world's nations cannot restrain themselves from destroying the last remaining intact natural habitats (of this world) in the race for "scarce resources" for immediate term survival. Plutocracies control it all, and seemingly there is no way to break out of the destructive stupidity of how human civlization has chosen to conduct itself. That downer aside, we are wired for optimism. So we cannot give up hope. From fiction, sometimes great imaginations do accelerate (tehcnological) breakthroughs in the real world.
Numbnuts using phrases like:
"I have nothing to hide, so I'm fine with this...", or
"If you don't like it, don't use the Internet..."
should be very careful what they type from now on. Deygoingetcha.
On the one hand, law enforcement focus their scopes on terrorists and gangs. At the same time, rotten elements within law enforcement can focus their scopes on things they happen to hate. This is all happening now. Not in some abstract future.
Microsoft, Apple, RIM, Nokia have histories working with the NSA & equivs installing backdoors in their OSes. And FB is a pathetic joke when it comes to privacy issues. Might as well assume zero privacy when it comes to social apps, webcams, and smartphone cameras.
Is there a contest running somewhere called "Can we turn any slashdot topic into an anti-rich diatribe"?
Filtering out echo chamber noise, those arguments you attack, imo, are about humanity's capacity for selective morality, antipathy, selfishness and greed (to not share). Collectively, humanity is not a moral species, nor has civilization ever operated with empathy. Human GE will be weaponized (priority), and expensive. If human civilization operated with morals (which includes empathy), for food, we'd prioritize R&D GE to grow farm animal meat - without brains with advanced nervous systems.
Sounds like an ad, but seriously I found the best advice there.
It is a decent read. And they did post a deal-breaker (for me anyway):
The mini-USB jack on the (Rosewill Cherry MX series) keyboard is not very sturdy. Lateral pressure on the protruding USB cable can fracture the solder on the tabs that help secure the connector to the internal PCB, causing the jack to push into the keyboard the next time the cable is plugged in...
Someone with assburgers has a crush on you or a mod is going into the deep end. I bothered to read AC's link to your post, and it is appears to be political spin (half-truths and lies). Do have to give props to mods that keep political spin (waste of time and thought) off slashdot.
Dude, fark dot com looks awesome. Useful info presented with decent, geniune non-mod-bum-kissing humor. Even the republican "politics" section appears informative in a non-crazy way, though I will never support anything that makes it easier for neocons to "make reality".
That is because when people are online they can be dicks without the threat of getting punched in the face. As Rosco said, "anonymously."
It is the bigger pussies face to face that are the bigger dicks online. Those people that go of on some psychotic tangent online would shy away and avoid such a situation in public, because they would get their asses kicked and possibly pushed into oncoming traffic.
Wishful thinking. Psycho ranters/flamers straight from all-day Rush Limbaugh/Glen Beck/Sean Hannity poison do deserve to be knocked out. Lots of them are not cowards, just misguided. Keep anonymity on the Internet. We don't need politeness everywhere, especially in Internet forums.
What the Moderators do: -5 Off Topic
What the Anonymous Coward sees: +5 Attention.
This is not how negative feedback was supposed to work.
Who cares? Don't drop AC feature. Slashdot without anonymity option would be far less interesting and entertaining. Too many people worrying about what the mods are going to think or do? No thanks.
Lets say you have 2 daughters, both love drawing, coloring, & art in general. The younger one has obvious amazing talent, the other average. Are you going to say "sweetie, your sister is far superior to you when it comes to drawing, just look! OMG! You on the otherhand, should give up."??
Slashdot Mirror
No doubt Nicira's Network Virtualization Platform will hurt Cisco unit sales now and in the immediate future. Premium Cisco h/w prices will be ending real soon. At least with non-hypervisor-aware models. With VMware's recent acquisition of Nicira, and Cisco expanding its partnership with Citrix, say goodby to the VMware/Cisco alliance. SDNs will virtualize most, if not all, gigantic data centers and enterprise networks in short order. But who will dominate the transition?. Regardless, I wouldn't bet against Cisco's ability to survive and thrive through these coming changes. And I don't think you should stop studying for your CCIE, it that's something you're doing. You should find out as much as you can about Nicira's SDN controller s/w.
VMware is making some bold but good moves here. I wonder why the damn day traders and insiders have recently abandoned VMW stock. One market analyst writes an article about "the server virtualization market being saturated" and they panic and they all bail out. Very very tricky of you, you god damned short-term volatility creating bastards with your inside tips from column writing analysts.
Romney is surrounding himself with Bush neocons and you know a Romney administration would staff key cabinet positions with them. And he doesn't know anything about foreign policy, and couldn't care less about earth sciences - specifically environmental science. No, he would leave all that to neocons and big oil construction companies to deal with. Shock & awe, bombing runs, land wars, fear in the form of colorful terror warning labels, etc. More war (non-infrastructure investment) debt that does nothing good for the US economy, except grab more oil at the high cost of war. The only "good thing" for you Slashdotters are Romney's promised high bracket tax cuts. And if you're a one issue voter that'd be it. Otherwise, you know better. So the question is: get bigger tax returns and fuck-up middle easterners and the earth's biosphere, or not?
If a web browser serves as a front-end to all of a large corporation's apps, I would recommend the $250ish Google Chromebooks over Win8. But only because Win8 UI is ridiculously confusing & alien to Windows users. Win8 will only accelerate enterprise IT to look elsewhere, including Google's low cost Chromebooks for its users. Microsoft should have continued refining the desktop UI, like Win7 did - Hint: should've kept desktop PC/Workstations and Laptops in mind as a priority, should've added some of the best desktop features from Linux, and kept touchscreen tablet & monitor features as a secondary amenity - not a priority. Win8 makes it appear Microsoft is in a rush to abandon Intel & AMD and PC/Workstations in general. Microsoft's Win8 is unfriendly with regards to desktop workstation user experience, and is a waste of time and money when compared to alternatives (front-ends) from Google. Microsoft had better support Win7 for the same length of time it supported WindowsXP. I won't recommend Win8 to any enterprise network.
Republicans have become science-suppressors, not the democrats. To equate the two parties in this manner is a false equivalency. Romney made it clear: he and the neocons don't give a shit about concerns coming from earth sciences. I have a problem with appointing industry lobbyists with religious nutballs that actually think Earth is a temporary testing ground for some binary test. This effectively grants permission for offending corporations to go nuts with reckless destructive processes unimpeded by responsible, rational planning.
Government was designed to protect its citizens from enemies, both foreign and domestic. When big corporations have their way with our federally protected lands, sea & air, a government agency, the dept. of the interior (in this case) was designed to ensure any management & distribution of these scarce and precious resources be done in a responsible way or not at all. But when you have an administration that cynically appoints big-oil, lumber, cattle, & coal lobbyists along with religious wackos into top positions, including #1 & #2, then things fall apart and you get reckless wild-west mentality that benefits a very narrow bunch of companies at the expense of everyone else, including future generations. Then what do you do? You blame government. That's the Koch Brothers way. Its how you wind up with people voting against their own interests with a passion. But its destructive both near-term and long-term for this country, for this world's finely tuned biosphere, and its immediate future. This world with its comfortable evolved biosphere is all there is for humanity. And humanity cannot duplicate it any meaningful way, any time soon.
What is that with Americans playing on the person all the time?
In Holland, we have had politicians who were publicly known to visit SM dungeons and black rooms. Are publicly gay. Or just unmarried, like our current prime minister. And no-one, literally no-one, makes a fuzz out of that.
Any debate will be about political issues. The worst accusations regarding personal lifes is about possible activist behaviour in the past. Working for greenpeace for example, like the current leader of the big labour party who has been arrested at least 10 times due to his activist history.
So.. I think this is a good thing. I'm not seeing how a politicians personal life, sexlife, hobbies, children, wife or man, has anything to do with the quality of the person as politician, and the message he or she brings. They are ordinary humans just like you and me with human desires, emotions and errors.
So, why with 'you' it is an issue if a politician plays a rogue in WoW? I wouldn't know, and have no issue with it myself untill she ganks me. If any, it only proves she's just as human as the 2 million other rogues around in this game, and is in for some fun and entertainment at a time, proving she's got a modern youthful mind..
2 cents from over the atlantic.
They're treated like babies and things are highly censored in a strange way. Something to do with empire maintenance, ya know... keep em fat, happy, ignorant & uninformed. Still, I do like Marshall Dillon in the old b&w episodes.
TED Talk: Dan Pink on the surprising science of motivation.:
Well said. But I don't have an account and no one else on here is going to mod you up as ~"west = bad" is the way to get mod points.
Good because you are clearly a simpleton.
That's another title we see here once every [n] months. I still work on what I used to call a mainframe ("Enterprise Server", or "Big iron", or "my baby") and I expect to still be using a PC for many years. Slow news day at Slashdot HQ? I bet we see the "can anyone be a programmer or does it take special skills" one soon. (Oh, wait...)
I hope its hype and nothing more, but it seems different this time, ie. dwindling unit sales, s/w piracy, difficulty of PC manufacturers to remain barely profitable. What applications really drove the explosive growth of personal computers anyway? Email, web, word processing, spreadsheets, CAD, forums, IRC, compilers/assemblers, and computer games. All those apps, with the exception of CAD, and the most graphics-intensive online/offline computer games are mostly F2P in the "cloud". For those cloud apps, h/w that can run a web browser is the minimum requirement, so the PC is overkill in that case. Much smaller, less energy intensive, and dumber devices like smartphones and tablets will suffice for those apps. Still need fast 3D graphics accelerators, i/o ports for large HD monitors & good qwerty keyboards though. People saying these are ancient fossil dinosaurs for i/o that need to go instinct are wrong, often moronic.
IIRC Why do the Chicken Littles always seem to disappear when their predictions fail, yet again, to come true? When there's a drought or a heat wave, they're always the first to jump in front of the mic screaming "Global warming--Weesa all gonna die!!!." When it's flooding or mild--nowhere to be found. Oil well rupture, "End of the World! Run for your lives!" Rupture turns out to not have much of an effect at all--hey, where did they go?
Guess they're off preparing for the next disaster that's going to destroy us all.
Thousands if not tens of thousands big & small, fish, birds, dolphins, seals, sea-turtles, coral reefs, sea-lions, walruses, everything that comes into contact with the 170M+ gallons of oil that leaked from the ruptured BP Gulf oil well due to irresponsible reckless idiots at BP & Deepwater drilling, you DF wannabe lobbyist.
There's something in the proverbial water that's effectively dumbing down huge swaths of the general populous when it comes to political worldviews overwriting reality. A few observations: What are the sources of their information? I heard from a friend of a friend that...; I heard on the radio...; I read in a magazine...; I saw in the news...; I read on the Internet...
What passes for "free press" these days - Radio, TV/Cable, online blogs, magazines, are virtually all for-profit commercial organizations heavily funded by advertisers and commercial foundations. Every person, every organization is corruptible - given the right price and/or level of coercion.
It is inevitable, in our modus operandi, that the richest most powerful commercial interests become embedded in the general population's psyche as something "good". Just watch/read some BP, Chevron, Exxon/Mobile commercials/advertisements. Its the echo chamber in action.
Hypocritical religious fantacism has wrapped itself around the GOP. These poeple don't give a damn about this world. Its all about the next world with them. That's why the U.S. cannot afford to have these crazy people in foreign affairs, with trigger-happy fingers on the big red button, nor should they ever again run agencies such as the Dept. of the Interior.
We evolved from primordial goo; were the first to evolve a self-aware intellect that allowed us to dominate all species and become a geophysical force that now threatens its own existence by short-sighted foolishness. Countless non-human sentient beings, with complex nervous systems, with brains, have suffered unspeakable torturous existence, and demise, due to human activity, most notably the harvested factory farm animals to feed our rapidly growing, expanding biomass. From science, with its observations, experiments, hypothesis & assertions, people with empathy want to preserve humanity's existence well into the future by preserving a biosphere with robust intact ecosystems, while at the same time, minimizing suffering of all lifeforms. From fanatical evangelical theologies, people apparently selfishly only care for their (hypothetical) next world "heaven". To them, this world, with all its pressing issues means nothing. These useless bastards need to GTFO of the way of progress. We all have less and less time to keep fucking around.
The only "innovation" going on in "the cloud" is the commoditization of routing/switching functions via SDNs (what Google & Nicira are doing). The cloud+tablet hype is an obvious swing back to a centralized model for corporate IT - only this time data centers are primarily accessed via public Internet pipes vs. private broadband. Downsides include loss of robust internally controlled data security and privacy, and increasing dependance upon ISPs and 3rd-party massive arrays of VMs. Whatever threats each of those high-profile entities are exposed to, ie. govts.and other criminal organizations infiltrating & snooping, so to will you and your company be equally visible and vulnerable. It would be very unfortunate if a robust desktop PC marketplace succumbs to cloud-dependent iPad-like dumb terminals. Don't let desktop PCs disappear.
1. Get him a new e-mail address & don't associate it with any social media apps, especially facebook
2. Change his phone number, unlisted
3. backup data to a HDD
4. repartition & format primary HDD, install OS (assuming win32)
5. install an "Internet Security Suite" from either: Kaspersky, BitDefender, Eset
6. install SOHO Deep Packet Inspection Firewall with VPN (~$300), ie. Sonicwall TZ100 (recently acquired by Dell):
http://www.sonicwall.com/us/products/TZ_100.html
- review of TZ100: http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/products/review-sonicwall-tz-100-router/989
- this might be astroturf comparison of Sonicwall vs. Cisco, but worth a read:
http://www.firewalls.com/sonicwall_vs_cisco
What are your opinions on "Consumer Report" reviews? Are they legit to any degree? I'm trying to find a dependable central A/C & heating package. Every damn review out there is well written astroturf lies. After reading around a dozen positive reviews for a particular brand/model, I almost bought it, but luckily, I ran across a very negative, very detailed, review. Whether or not that one negative review was legit or from a competitor, I truly could not discern. It just seemed like a real dissatisfied customer warning others not to fall for a piece of expensive high-maintenance garbage . So I kept looking. Still am.
I anticipate that we will see Metro and the touchscreen UI concept for Desktops go by the wayside within two years. Win8 will get patched to remove the Metro UI (With Metro Apps running in non-fullscreen windows instead) the Start button and Start menu will return and that will be the end of this abortive experiment in "blended" UIs.
If that happens, Microsoft is finished in the consumer space. I don't think they are willing to lose consumer. They remember far too well how they beat IBM, Unisys and DEC for the enterprise desktop.
IMO, this is about a gamble Microsoft, under Ballmer, is taking by betting traditional PC desktops are obsolete and on their way out as a front-end to "cloud" apps & data. Regardless where the actual apps & data wind up residing, I prefer powerful PC/Workstations that can function equally proficient either online or offline, for all things non-trivial. I like giant HD monitors, a great tactile keyboard, decent mouse/trackball/pen tablet input devices. Tablets do not replace any of that in any way. I do not want to have to be constantly online to get anything done. I don't want to be forced to type on lame, error-prone touch-screen virtual keyboards. At home, I want a powerhouse desktop PC to handle video & photo editing, diagrams/drawing, presentations, playing games, & messing around with personal coding projects. According to Oracle, the desktop OS should've died over a decade ago and been replaced with dumb terminals running a web browser exclusively. If Ballmer can't adjust the behemoth's current course of foolishly chasing Google/Amazon/Apple into Cloud hype in 3rd place, and prioritize core MS strengths (desktop & server OS, MS Office) MS deserves to slam into that iceberg dead ahead.
I want to know, in a nutshell, will your administration be more likely to make decisions, and form policies, based on scientific realities, or on industry funded pseudoscience? Press for this debate loudly. All too often, scientists in general, are too polite, too subdued, whereas brash know-it-all MBAs & Lawyers can't restrain themselves & their abilities to whip up a crowd for obfuscated, short-sighted, often selfish (greedy) counterproductive reasons. It is pathetic, the progress science-deniers/ detractors have made in the public consciousness in areas that truly matter: habitat destruction, green house gases, marine pollution, stratospheric ozone depletion, aka collectively screwing around with the global nitrogen cycle.
Niven and Lucas make great space operas. But we have to admit to some limitations. Come back in a few million years, and whatever species have descended from us may have a different opinion. But us? No, we have no chance.
We are hardwired for optimism, for better and for worse. And future milestone breakthroughs are very hard to predict. Some predict an accurate simulation of the human brain is only several years away. Strong AI shouldn't be too far off after that. Strong AI will expand the sphere of whats possible, technologically. But we human beings are most defintely very primitive. IMO, we have never possessed the type of ethical wisdom, nor moral courage that would allow our species to survive well into the future. As it is, the world's nations cannot restrain themselves from destroying the last remaining intact natural habitats (of this world) in the race for "scarce resources" for immediate term survival. Plutocracies control it all, and seemingly there is no way to break out of the destructive stupidity of how human civlization has chosen to conduct itself. That downer aside, we are wired for optimism. So we cannot give up hope. From fiction, sometimes great imaginations do accelerate (tehcnological) breakthroughs in the real world.
Numbnuts using phrases like: "I have nothing to hide, so I'm fine with this...", or "If you don't like it, don't use the Internet..." should be very careful what they type from now on. Deygoingetcha. On the one hand, law enforcement focus their scopes on terrorists and gangs. At the same time, rotten elements within law enforcement can focus their scopes on things they happen to hate. This is all happening now. Not in some abstract future. Microsoft, Apple, RIM, Nokia have histories working with the NSA & equivs installing backdoors in their OSes. And FB is a pathetic joke when it comes to privacy issues. Might as well assume zero privacy when it comes to social apps, webcams, and smartphone cameras.
Is there a contest running somewhere called "Can we turn any slashdot topic into an anti-rich diatribe"?
Filtering out echo chamber noise, those arguments you attack, imo, are about humanity's capacity for selective morality, antipathy, selfishness and greed (to not share). Collectively, humanity is not a moral species, nor has civilization ever operated with empathy. Human GE will be weaponized (priority), and expensive. If human civilization operated with morals (which includes empathy), for food, we'd prioritize R&D GE to grow farm animal meat - without brains with advanced nervous systems.
Sounds like an ad, but seriously I found the best advice there.
It is a decent read. And they did post a deal-breaker (for me anyway):
The mini-USB jack on the (Rosewill Cherry MX series) keyboard is not very sturdy. Lateral pressure on the protruding USB cable can fracture the solder on the tabs that help secure the connector to the internal PCB, causing the jack to push into the keyboard the next time the cable is plugged in...
What were they thinking?
Someone with assburgers has a crush on you or a mod is going into the deep end. I bothered to read AC's link to your post, and it is appears to be political spin (half-truths and lies). Do have to give props to mods that keep political spin (waste of time and thought) off slashdot.
Dude, fark dot com looks awesome. Useful info presented with decent, geniune non-mod-bum-kissing humor. Even the republican "politics" section appears informative in a non-crazy way, though I will never support anything that makes it easier for neocons to "make reality".
That is because when people are online they can be dicks without the threat of getting punched in the face. As Rosco said, "anonymously." It is the bigger pussies face to face that are the bigger dicks online. Those people that go of on some psychotic tangent online would shy away and avoid such a situation in public, because they would get their asses kicked and possibly pushed into oncoming traffic.
Wishful thinking. Psycho ranters/flamers straight from all-day Rush Limbaugh/Glen Beck/Sean Hannity poison do deserve to be knocked out. Lots of them are not cowards, just misguided. Keep anonymity on the Internet. We don't need politeness everywhere, especially in Internet forums.
Anonymous Coward: FROST PIST
What the Moderators do: -5 Off Topic What the Anonymous Coward sees: +5 Attention.
This is not how negative feedback was supposed to work.
Who cares? Don't drop AC feature. Slashdot without anonymity option would be far less interesting and entertaining. Too many people worrying about what the mods are going to think or do? No thanks.
Lets say you have 2 daughters, both love drawing, coloring, & art in general. The younger one has obvious amazing talent, the other average. Are you going to say "sweetie, your sister is far superior to you when it comes to drawing, just look! OMG! You on the otherhand, should give up."??