With ESX Server, VMotion, and an EMC SAN you can do some cool things like seamlessly move a virtual machine from one piece of physical hardware to the next.
For instance, you *could* just get your picture of the situation in Iraq from reading CNN.com, or you could do that, then hop over to the BBC, Al Jazeera, Reporters sans Frontières, Amnesty International and any others that might take your fancy for a much more rounded view. It'll probably be more accurate too.
So a "more rounded" and "accurate" view only involves cherry picking from organizations that all present similiar shades of bias? Please. A diversity of sources doesn't mean a diversity of views, especially in this case.
As others have pointed out, the danger in any medium, but more so with the Internet and New Media in particular, is that the ability to set up an echo chamber is strikingly easy.
God forbid they try to tailor their advertising efforts to make them more specific and thus more efficient! Oh, just think of the unspeakable horror of waking up one day and seeing an advertisement in your mailbox for - *gasp* - something you might actually want to buy. When will this horrible oppression end!?
Secure and auditable Instant Messaging has been something the financial industry has been wanting for a while. If you've listened to an NPR station lately, I'm sure you've heard the ad for Reuters' IM client built around SIMPLE.
This legislation can be stopped. It only takes 40 Senators to filibuster a bill, and if the Democrats are willing to show some guts, there might be enough pro-civil liberties Republicans to shoot it down there, too.
Yeah, because they sure jumped on board to vote it down the last time.
Negroponte works at/for the MIT Media Lab. While forward-thinking is great and actually quite necessary for technical improvements and evolution, I have *yet* to see one of his predictions pan out. Read "Being Digital." He wrote that back in the late nineties gushing about how much the Digital Revolution (tm) would change everyone's lives. Well, where's my flying car!?
It just takes time and re-examination of existing designs. For instance, the Dell PowerEdge 2650 has no internal cabling. The drive backplans pugs directly into the mainboard, which has a PERC3 RAID controller built right into the PCB. Opening the case, all you see is sea of green circuitboards.
Of course, one of the biggest hurdles to overcome with a design like this is properly laying down those circuit traces. Your average ATX board is already pretty cramped and the addition of traces and other major design changes just to do away with cables is currently cost prohibitive for most applications.
However, when you're talking server systems that already cost as much as most people's cars, it becomes easier to justisfy changes like these as they allow for quicker service and higher reliability: cables tangle and can be broken. It takes longer to build and repair systems where cabling must be routed. But when I can just flip a couple of levers and slide a couple of boards around to bring a critical server back online, then my company will be more likely to spend the extra dollars for the feature. It's easily recovered from the shorter periods of downtime.
Like most technology, it will take a while to trickle down from the high end to the consumers.
So let's try to sum this whole thing up: Organic farming is "better" because it produces ~20% less yield but there are more bugs in the ground. Yeah.
But let's delve deeper into the actual methodology. How big was the plot of land that they studied. One would assume that they would devote several hundred acres so that minor local anomalies would skew their results. Well, one would be wrong. The plot was about 3.5 acres. And what about the "ecological benefits" that make the smaller yields palatable? How was this actually measured? Did they look at chemical content in the earth? How about in the crops? No, they counted the number of worms and insects. How is that ecologically meaningful, especially with such a small sample size?
While there is a need for greater efficiency in the chemicals and methods of modern day farming, this "study" proves nothing. If anything, it shows that anyone who buys "organic" crops is getting ripped off. After all, if "organic" farming is so much more efficient (get a load of how they caculated that!) why do they cost more at the store!?
This, and other garbage science, is debunked on a regular basis at JunkScience.com
But, when Yahoo|Terra Lycos|MSN|AOL|Inktomi|Alta Vista put in a search result link to websites that that have paid to be listed first, you don't know if it's a "real" result, or if someone has paid to put it their.
Actually, you do. If you visit any of the sites you mentioned you will see that the "sponsored" links are set apart and labelled differently from the rest of the search results. And, *gasp*, they have a link that explains that these are sponsored results.
If you're really concerned, visit the source of all those evil, and relevant, sponsored results and you can see how much each advertiser is paying per click. Then, you can scroll down to the free listings and use those.
Seriously people, why would someone *pay* to direct traffic to their business web site if it wasn't traffic that's going to spend money?
I'm going to have to take issue with you on (2): Overture (formerly GoTo.com) has used the pay for placement model since Day One. That is their business model. And they aren't doing too bad. Keep abreast of the news before you make blanket statements.
I don't have a problem with advertiser supported sites running banner ads along the top or bottom of the page. Heck, even the sidebar ads like The Register uses aren't really that annoying. I think most people's biggest complaint is that they slow down load times for many pages.
This latest "development" seems to underscore the point that advertising online isn't working. It seems that banner ads are becoming like billboards along the highway. They're there, you sort of notice them, but when was the last time you really paid attention and were influenced by them? So the advertisers are nowing going to go to greater and greater lengths to grab interest by making it nearly impossible to miss the ads on the pages. So, they're making the "standard" sizes larger. Or they stick the ad in the middle of the page. But the vast majority of users will continue to just tune them out.
In the end, we'll probably just have a handful of companies like doubleclick that serve out these ads, and lower and lower click-through prices being paid to the sites that host the banners. Maybe someday someone will develop a formula that works better, for people viewing a site as well as advertisers, than the current crop of banners that are populating the web.
Slashdot Mirror
With ESX Server, VMotion, and an EMC SAN you can do some cool things like seamlessly move a virtual machine from one piece of physical hardware to the next.
Where do you get the bizarre notion that Microsoft isn't firmly behind the move to IPv6? It's supported in Windows XP and 2003 and Microsoft has made dev kits available for Windows 2000.
Of course, all this information was just a Google away but you FUDers just love to practice your craft.
So a "more rounded" and "accurate" view only involves cherry picking from organizations that all present similiar shades of bias? Please. A diversity of sources doesn't mean a diversity of views, especially in this case.
As others have pointed out, the danger in any medium, but more so with the Internet and New Media in particular, is that the ability to set up an echo chamber is strikingly easy.
From the looks of things, he's a philosophy major with the math skills and economic understanding that accompanies that.
... as the Nextel Wireless card I'm using right now? I get between 1 and 3 Mbps downstream and a little less than 1 Mbps upload.
God forbid they try to tailor their advertising efforts to make them more specific and thus more efficient! Oh, just think of the unspeakable horror of waking up one day and seeing an advertisement in your mailbox for - *gasp* - something you might actually want to buy. When will this horrible oppression end!?
Secure and auditable Instant Messaging has been something the financial industry has been wanting for a while. If you've listened to an NPR station lately, I'm sure you've heard the ad for Reuters' IM client built around SIMPLE.
Negroponte works at/for the MIT Media Lab. While forward-thinking is great and actually quite necessary for technical improvements and evolution, I have *yet* to see one of his predictions pan out. Read "Being Digital." He wrote that back in the late nineties gushing about how much the Digital Revolution (tm) would change everyone's lives. Well, where's my flying car!?
It just takes time and re-examination of existing designs. For instance, the Dell PowerEdge 2650 has no internal cabling. The drive backplans pugs directly into the mainboard, which has a PERC3 RAID controller built right into the PCB. Opening the case, all you see is sea of green circuitboards.
Of course, one of the biggest hurdles to overcome with a design like this is properly laying down those circuit traces. Your average ATX board is already pretty cramped and the addition of traces and other major design changes just to do away with cables is currently cost prohibitive for most applications.
However, when you're talking server systems that already cost as much as most people's cars, it becomes easier to justisfy changes like these as they allow for quicker service and higher reliability: cables tangle and can be broken. It takes longer to build and repair systems where cabling must be routed. But when I can just flip a couple of levers and slide a couple of boards around to bring a critical server back online, then my company will be more likely to spend the extra dollars for the feature. It's easily recovered from the shorter periods of downtime.
Like most technology, it will take a while to trickle down from the high end to the consumers.
So let's try to sum this whole thing up: Organic farming is "better" because it produces ~20% less yield but there are more bugs in the ground. Yeah.
But let's delve deeper into the actual methodology. How big was the plot of land that they studied. One would assume that they would devote several hundred acres so that minor local anomalies would skew their results. Well, one would be wrong. The plot was about 3.5 acres. And what about the "ecological benefits" that make the smaller yields palatable? How was this actually measured? Did they look at chemical content in the earth? How about in the crops? No, they counted the number of worms and insects. How is that ecologically meaningful, especially with such a small sample size?
While there is a need for greater efficiency in the chemicals and methods of modern day farming, this "study" proves nothing. If anything, it shows that anyone who buys "organic" crops is getting ripped off. After all, if "organic" farming is so much more efficient (get a load of how they caculated that!) why do they cost more at the store!?
This, and other garbage science, is debunked on a regular basis at JunkScience.com
But, when Yahoo|Terra Lycos|MSN|AOL|Inktomi|Alta Vista put in a search result link to websites that that have paid to be listed first, you don't know if it's a "real" result, or if someone has paid to put it their.
Actually, you do. If you visit any of the sites you mentioned you will see that the "sponsored" links are set apart and labelled differently from the rest of the search results. And, *gasp*, they have a link that explains that these are sponsored results.
If you're really concerned, visit the source of all those evil, and relevant, sponsored results and you can see how much each advertiser is paying per click. Then, you can scroll down to the free listings and use those.
Seriously people, why would someone *pay* to direct traffic to their business web site if it wasn't traffic that's going to spend money?
I'm going to have to take issue with you on (2): Overture (formerly GoTo.com) has used the pay for placement model since Day One. That is their business model. And they aren't doing too bad. Keep abreast of the news before you make blanket statements.
I don't have a problem with advertiser supported sites running banner ads along the top or bottom of the page. Heck, even the sidebar ads like The Register uses aren't really that annoying. I think most people's biggest complaint is that they slow down load times for many pages.
This latest "development" seems to underscore the point that advertising online isn't working. It seems that banner ads are becoming like billboards along the highway. They're there, you sort of notice them, but when was the last time you really paid attention and were influenced by them? So the advertisers are nowing going to go to greater and greater lengths to grab interest by making it nearly impossible to miss the ads on the pages. So, they're making the "standard" sizes larger. Or they stick the ad in the middle of the page. But the vast majority of users will continue to just tune them out.
In the end, we'll probably just have a handful of companies like doubleclick that serve out these ads, and lower and lower click-through prices being paid to the sites that host the banners. Maybe someday someone will develop a formula that works better, for people viewing a site as well as advertisers, than the current crop of banners that are populating the web.
DigitalRover