This article is a prime example of the only goal beeing the headline. About the only number in the article is the proclaimed 30% efficiency. All the rest looks very much like there is not even a single prototype. I very much doubt there is much more than a (probably excellent) idea and some lab experiments behind the entire thing.
I'll believe it when I can buy it for a reasonable cost at a store in town.
For years we have every couple of months there a new revolutionary way to convert solar rays to electricity. Unfortunately none has managed to work in the real world except the good old silicon solar cells.
My car, as are most cars of my friends and collegues, are used as utility as for as long it makes sense economically. This is true for 90% of the cars here. I drive 25k km annually which translates to 250k over 10 years. At the moment I must decide if it makes sense to replace the clutch for about $ 1k to push the vehicle another two years or if I get a newer car now.
The only time of the day I can drive on the highway without another car i sight is maybe betwen 3 and 5 in the morning. At all other times it is cramped. Such technology makes no sense if you are the only one on the road, but if there are lots of vehicles it makes a lot of sense.
While it might not take off as stellar as the inventors hope I don't agree with most your criticism.
1. Ubiquitousness: While the very first driver has no benefit I will certainly be useful as soon as there are 5% of the cars equipped. The transmission will be for hundreds of feet ahead/behind.
2. Cost: True, but not as bad as it looks. All high end cars already have electronics enough, that one more does not add a big amount. First adopters can be motivated with gadgets like a garage door which opens automatically as you get home.
3. Average lifespan of a car is more like 10 years, it's not built for more and becomes too expensive to maintain as it get's old.
4. This will not change liability at all. The same rules apply. If you bang into the car ahead and try to get away 'he was not equipped' you'll get 'go to pay attention as driver' as reply.
The Windows Update Server is perfect for the SOHO environment where a large number of individuals care for their own PC and install directly from the server. The *server* makes sure that the wrong patch don't get to the PC.
However, there is no such tool for a large IT organisation who wants to control what patches are installed where. This requires a distribution mechanism (there are plenty available on the market) and an tool to apply the patch. This is where Microsoft ought to provide a usable mechanism, designed to do pre- and co-requisite checking and to work unattended.
The Windows OS doesn't even have a decent software inventory which allows to list the level of the individual components. Windows and its updates is still managed at an individual file level, there is no notion of package grouping related items together.
Here an example (from AIX, have the box handy): First a list of the state and version of the networking components, second the history of the tcp server package. You can get similar listings on Solaris, HP-UX, Digital OS and Linux.
Show me something remotely similar on Windows.
maba:/home/maba > lslpp -L "bos.net.*" Fileset Level State Description bos.net.nfs.client 4.3.3.28 C Network File System Client bos.net.nfs.server 4.3.3.10 C Network File System Server bos.net.ppp 4.3.3.25 C Async Point to Point Protocol bos.net.tcp.adt 4.3.3.26 C TCP/IP Application Toolkit bos.net.tcp.client 4.3.3.28 C TCP/IP Client Support bos.net.tcp.server 4.3.3.27 C TCP/IP Server bos.net.tcp.smit 4.3.3.25 C TCP/IP SMIT Support bos.net.uucp 4.3.3.10 C Unix to Unix Copy Program
Microsofts problem ist that they provide an operating system with no secure way to apply patches securely on a large scale.
If you apply whatever patch on a usable os (AIX, Solaris, Linux) the package manager will attempt to apply and then back ou saying there is a prerequisite missing. The result of the human error would have been 70'000 error messages instead of 70'000 broken systems.
No offense taken. But it is important to understand that important transformations of an enterprise take a long time. I don't beleave that Sun can decide to change direction and within two years the company is turned around and focussed in the new direction.
Like the transition IBM started 14 years ago. The 'services' work ist quite old in IBM. Lou Gerstner joined in 1993 and he really pushed services but he could already count on some awareness. It really takes that long to set a new course in a big company.
Markus (Disclosure: I joined IBM in 86 and am hanging on...)
All enterprise clusters I know of are in the 2 to 10 node range. The only reason there is a cluster is because of automated failover in the case of node or site failure. Performance and scalability is of no importance, they just buy a bigger box if necessary.
Some of the sites have hundreds of machines, all clustered in small, manageable units. These are high-end IBM AIX boxes, high-end fiber storage with two sites 50km apart.
Enterprises buy clusters for availability, not for scalability !
This is one of the first things that hit me: The entire Congo area is light green, while it's equivalent in America (Amazon) remains dark. While the sparks are bright in the US, Eu and China, this is a much larger area with a significant level.
The extensive DVD-writer & media tests in CT I've been reading show that almost all DVD-writers have quality problems when writing faster than 2x. Media quality is a big problem and you have to find which media your writer happens to like.
I think this is an even greater problem then the DVD+/- controversy. Most writers write both these days, you know hat you get before you buy. But many media/writer combinations have quality problems and here you don't know if you'll get a usable result in advance.
The test as it is applied here is not a good test. The items added are obscure enough that the time was too short for them to get caught. The results can only be significative if the wrong information is left there for weeks or months.
The only conclusion is that obscure fake facts are not caught within a couple of hours/days.
They thought there was hope to find something, but didn't look closely enough to see these were all blanks.
Was it a hope for IBM et al to buy them out and save a failing Company ?
I think so. Unfortunately for them IBM preferred to stand up and defend its honour, than hand over a wad of money to shut them up.
Microsoft was not involved right at the beginning. It then bought a dummy license for a couple of million and was probably at least close to the investors handing over $50M last year (Baystar/RBC PIPE deal).
All other languages looked at are scripting languages with great interactivity. Just press/type 'run' after the bug is fixed and you get your instant gratification in milliseconds. Compiled languages like Java need e compile cycle. Java is the worst due to the long startup time of the JVM. I have never seen, even on multimillon-$ hardware, a snappy Java app. Even 'Hello World' has visible responsetime !
I prefer the Java language over perl, python, php, etc. The structure helps me to rapidly stitch a reliable program together. But I use the others more due to the snappy development cycle. I want milliseconds, not seconds !
Markus
I've seen most IT shops in my area
on
IT Myths
·
· Score: 1
and know a bunch of sales reps using said myths amply for each call
Upgrades really don't matter: The only upgrades I've seen is adding more memory in a underequipped server. In all other cases the better choice is to swap the box.
Corporate data on Mainframes: It depends how you count. If there still is a mainframe it tends to hold the business-critical data. How do you compare the GB account data of your bank with its TB of emails ?
Single Platform: Real life precludes a it. PC's run Microsoft, the business is on a Mainframe and stock exchange software only works on Sun...
CIO, business or tech guy: They need both skills. Business savy to communicate with the rest of the company and tech expertise to keep the tech part on track. Most of the time the tech part suffers, they rely on salestalk and projects are in trouble.
Projects fail: It depends on the way you measure. If on time and budget it the mark, then many fail. Probably because the scope was not defined enough and reality caught up to illusion only during implementation.
IT doesn't scale: IT does scale well enough for most cases. The exception is when a PC hacker designs a corporate data warehouse with VB & Access and the customer was stupid enough to buy it.
Over here in Switzerland we around four times a year, not only elections, but also concrete stuff. (Do you agree that the state spends 50M on a new hospital ?, do you agree on the latest trade contract with the european union ?, etc).
All of this works perfectly fine on paper. The votes are counted manually by normal citizens in up to four hours of work. Absolutely no problem !
This vulnerability relies in part on the problem that it is easy to send an IP packet with a false source address (IP spoofing).
What is the reason preventing IP carriers from implementing anti-spoofing filters ?
In some environments this is certainly difficult, but most carriers know if a source address of a packet leaving their network is valid or not and could just drop spoofed packets.
In practice there will certainly be difficulties, but I think such filtering is a necessary evil like anti-spam and anti-virus mechanisms.
While there is no production quality 64bit OS for the AMD 64 ready today, there is a whole bunch coming up.
In three years, when it's time againt to buy something new, I prefer to have an AMD 64 as my second computer than a Pentium. The AMD 64 will allow me to run leading-edge stuff, while the Pentium will not. If, for whatever
reason, the 64bit stuff is not important, it will make a fine 32bit machine also.
The AMD 64 CPU's give me a 64bit option today I don't have with any Pentium. The interesting part is that this option comes with no price
or performance penalty, quite to the contrary, price/performance tends to be better in the AMD camp.
Just take a look at the error message of the typiccal slashdotted PHP-website. It's all about some DB-connection error. Java with good connection pooling handles this much more graceful - the site gets slow, but it still works.
You are only partially right. People are not complaining about the remote mountains in the US not beeing covered. I't more that you don't have coverage as soon as you dare to drive out of the city or your place has less than 100k inhabitants.
The other thing about Switzerland is that it is very densely populated. Even more so than your number suggest. Unfortunately 50% of the countries surface is either ininhabitable mountain, glacier or lake. Even in these areas the coverage is quite good.
It is certainly not only due to Geography. Here is Switzerland you are now hard pressed to find an area without coverage. Even very remote mountain valleys have reception. If you are in a somewhat inhabited area you'll have usable coverage, maybe not inside a concrete building, but certainly by the window.
The very regulated market during the birth of the cellular system (essentially one monopoly per country) has helped to get the one GSM system going everywhere. Deregulation has helped to get the prices down now, so we sort of enjoy the best of both worlds.
Only that the web was really invented at CERN as a byproduct of the main physics research. Tim Berners-Lee was working to improve the communication and collaboration of the Particle Physicists. This is still very important, as they do most of their work at home and come visiting the center only once in a while.
When I used to be Hi-Fi technician in the late seventies, most of the stereos we sold were the racked variety. There were some compacts too, but most were cumbesome. (Bang and Olufsen had nice compacts, but at a price).
One mayor difference is that some of the basic building blocks for PC 'compacts' are more expensive (LCD vs CRT, mobile vs desktop CPU, etc). This was/is not the same with stereos.
Slashdot Mirror
This article is a prime example of the only goal beeing the headline. About the only number in the article is the proclaimed 30% efficiency. All the rest looks very much like there is not even a single prototype. I very much doubt there is much more than a (probably excellent) idea and some lab experiments behind the entire thing.
Markus
I'll believe it when I can buy it for a reasonable cost at a store in town.
For years we have every couple of months there a new revolutionary way to convert solar rays to electricity. Unfortunately none has managed to work in the real world except the good old silicon solar cells.
Markus
My car, as are most cars of my friends and collegues, are used as utility as for as long it makes sense economically. This is true for 90% of the cars here. I drive 25k km annually which translates to 250k over 10 years. At the moment I must decide if it makes sense to replace the clutch for about $ 1k to push the vehicle another two years or if I get a newer car now.
The only time of the day I can drive on the highway without another car i sight is maybe betwen 3 and 5 in the morning. At all other times it is cramped. Such technology makes no sense if you are the only one on the road, but if there are lots of vehicles it makes a lot of sense.
Markus
While it might not take off as stellar as the inventors hope I don't agree with most your criticism.
1. Ubiquitousness: While the very first driver has no benefit I will certainly be useful as soon as there are 5% of the cars equipped. The transmission will be for hundreds of feet ahead/behind.
2. Cost: True, but not as bad as it looks. All high end cars already have electronics enough, that one more does not add a big amount. First adopters can be motivated with gadgets like a garage door which opens automatically as you get home.
3. Average lifespan of a car is more like 10 years, it's not built for more and becomes too expensive to maintain as it get's old.
4. This will not change liability at all. The same rules apply. If you bang into the car ahead and try to get away 'he was not equipped' you'll get 'go to pay attention as driver' as reply.
Markus
The Windows Update Server is perfect for the SOHO environment where a large number of individuals care for their own PC and install directly from the server. The *server* makes sure that the wrong patch don't get to the PC.
However, there is no such tool for a large IT organisation who wants to control what patches are installed where. This requires a distribution mechanism (there are plenty available on the market) and an tool to apply the patch. This is where Microsoft ought to provide a usable mechanism, designed to do pre- and co-requisite checking and to work unattended.
The Windows OS doesn't even have a decent software inventory which allows to list the level of the individual components. Windows and its updates is still managed at an individual file level, there is no notion of package grouping related items together.
Here an example (from AIX, have the box handy): First a list of the state and version of the networking components, second the history of the tcp server package. You can get similar listings on Solaris, HP-UX, Digital OS and Linux.
Show me something remotely similar on Windows.
Markus
Sorry for the broken formatting, the slashdot replacement for is broken
Microsofts problem ist that they provide an operating system with no secure way to apply patches securely on a large scale.
If you apply whatever patch on a usable os (AIX, Solaris, Linux) the package manager will attempt to apply and then back ou saying there is a prerequisite missing. The result of the human error would have been 70'000 error messages instead of 70'000 broken systems.
Markus
No offense taken. But it is important to understand that important transformations of an enterprise take a long time. I don't beleave that Sun can decide to change direction and within two years the company is turned around and focussed in the new direction.
Markus
- like the transition IBM started 2 years ago?
Like the transition IBM started 14 years ago. The 'services' work ist quite old in IBM. Lou Gerstner joined in 1993 and he really pushed services but he could already count on some awareness. It really takes that long to set a new course in a big company.
Markus (Disclosure: I joined IBM in 86 and am hanging on...)
All enterprise clusters I know of are in the 2 to 10 node range. The only reason there is a cluster is because of automated failover in the case of node or site failure. Performance and scalability is of no importance, they just buy a bigger box if necessary.
Some of the sites have hundreds of machines, all clustered in small, manageable units. These are high-end IBM AIX boxes, high-end fiber storage with two sites 50km apart.
Enterprises buy clusters for availability, not for scalability !
Markus
This is one of the first things that hit me: The entire Congo area is light green, while it's equivalent in America (Amazon) remains dark. While the sparks are bright in the US, Eu and China, this is a much larger area with a significant level.
Why ?
Markus (scratching his head and thinking)
The extensive DVD-writer & media tests in CT I've been reading show that almost all DVD-writers have quality problems when writing faster than 2x. Media quality is a big problem and you have to find which media your writer happens to like.
I think this is an even greater problem then the DVD+/- controversy. Most writers write both these days, you know hat you get before you buy. But many media/writer combinations have quality problems and here you don't know if you'll get a usable result in advance.
Markus
The test as it is applied here is not a good test. The items added are obscure enough that the time was too short for them to get caught. The results can only be significative if the wrong information is left there for weeks or months.
The only conclusion is that obscure fake facts are not caught within a couple of hours/days.
Markus
I disagree somewhat and would say it this way:
They thought there was hope to find something, but didn't look closely enough to see these were all blanks.
I think so. Unfortunately for them IBM preferred to stand up and defend its honour, than hand over a wad of money to shut them up.
All other languages looked at are scripting languages with great interactivity. Just press/type 'run' after the bug is fixed and you get your instant gratification in milliseconds. Compiled languages like Java need e compile cycle. Java is the worst due to the long startup time of the JVM. I have never seen, even on multimillon-$ hardware, a snappy Java app. Even 'Hello World' has visible responsetime !
I prefer the Java language over perl, python, php, etc. The structure helps me to rapidly stitch a reliable program together. But I use the others more due to the snappy development cycle. I want milliseconds, not seconds !
Markus
and know a bunch of sales reps using said myths amply for each call
Markus
While I understand Googles desire for an extended beta-test period I find the black market surrounding the invites disgusting.
Markus
markus at markus dot org
I'd like one too, very much :-)
Markus
Over here in Switzerland we around four times a year, not only elections, but also concrete stuff. (Do you agree that the state spends 50M on a new hospital ?, do you agree on the latest trade contract with the european union ?, etc).
All of this works perfectly fine on paper. The votes are counted manually by normal citizens in up to four hours of work. Absolutely no problem !
Markus
This vulnerability relies in part on the problem that it is easy to send an IP packet with a false source address (IP spoofing).
What is the reason preventing IP carriers from implementing anti-spoofing filters ?
In some environments this is certainly difficult, but most carriers know if a source address of a packet leaving their network is valid or not and could just drop spoofed packets.
In practice there will certainly be difficulties, but I think such filtering is a necessary evil like anti-spam and anti-virus mechanisms.
Markus
While there is no production quality 64bit OS for the AMD 64 ready today, there is a whole bunch coming up.
In three years, when it's time againt to buy something new, I prefer to have an AMD 64 as my second computer than a Pentium. The AMD 64 will allow me to run leading-edge stuff, while the Pentium will not. If, for whatever reason, the 64bit stuff is not important, it will make a fine 32bit machine also.
The AMD 64 CPU's give me a 64bit option today I don't have with any Pentium. The interesting part is that this option comes with no price or performance penalty, quite to the contrary, price/performance tends to be better in the AMD camp.
Markus
Just take a look at the error message of the typiccal slashdotted PHP-website. It's all about some DB-connection error. Java with good connection pooling handles this much more graceful - the site gets slow, but it still works.
Markus
You are only partially right. People are not complaining about the remote mountains in the US not beeing covered. I't more that you don't have coverage as soon as you dare to drive out of the city or your place has less than 100k inhabitants.
The other thing about Switzerland is that it is very densely populated. Even more so than your number suggest. Unfortunately 50% of the countries surface is either ininhabitable mountain, glacier or lake. Even in these areas the coverage is quite good.
Markus
It is certainly not only due to Geography. Here is Switzerland you are now hard pressed to find an area without coverage. Even very remote mountain valleys have reception. If you are in a somewhat inhabited area you'll have usable coverage, maybe not inside a concrete building, but certainly by the window.
The very regulated market during the birth of the cellular system (essentially one monopoly per country) has helped to get the one GSM system going everywhere. Deregulation has helped to get the prices down now, so we sort of enjoy the best of both worlds.
Markus
Only that the web was really invented at CERN as a byproduct of the main physics research. Tim Berners-Lee was working to improve the communication and collaboration of the Particle Physicists. This is still very important, as they do most of their work at home and come visiting the center only once in a while.
Markus
When I used to be Hi-Fi technician in the late seventies, most of the stereos we sold were the racked variety. There were some compacts too, but most were cumbesome. (Bang and Olufsen had nice compacts, but at a price).
One mayor difference is that some of the basic building blocks for PC 'compacts' are more expensive (LCD vs CRT, mobile vs desktop CPU, etc). This was/is not the same with stereos.
Markus