For example, you mentioned accessing all your documents from computers away from home - with massive bandwidth, why connect to a centralized online service instead of just connecting to your home computer?
Just because you've got massive bandwidth doesn't mean you've got the kind of reliability that folks expect from web-based computing. I think it's safe to say that most ISPs will continue to over-sell their bandwidth and impose arbitrary limitations on what you can do with it. I've certainly got enough bandwidth right now to run a simple FTP server and pull down a copy of my resume anywhere I am...but my ISP won't allow me to do that. Then you've got the added hassle/overhead of actually maintaining a computer... Most folks have enough trouble just keeping a standalone desktop PC running properly - imagine if it had a direct, publicly visible connection to the Internet, 24/7. It'd be hosed in a matter of hours.
I'm trying to visualize the end-game for online office applications.
I can see hosted/online applications becoming very popular for the simple fact that there's no software to install, regardless of where you are. Sure, corporate IT worries about putting confidential data on someone else's server...but there's no reason they couldn't host their own apps. I know a lot of people would love the fact that they don't need to keep track of their discs, don't need to re-install software after a reload, don't have to wonder if their buddy has the right program to view the file. Just remember a username/password to your hosted application site and you can pull up anything and everything from anywhere in the world - just add bandwidth.
In the old days, dumb terminals accessed more powerful computers in order to provide more feature-rich functionality.
Given enough bandwidth I can very easily see a return to dumb terminals. We're already setting up businesses where the majority of the software lives on the server and is only accessed through Terminal Services and thin clients - it makes the desktop PC disposable. Couple that with craptons of bandwidth and a good hosted/virtualized environment... I can see a lot of home users switching over. They'd jump at a computer that was always available, instantly on, that they didn't have to keep updated with patches and antivirus, where someone else would fix any problems that crop up and keep everything working.
I work in School District IT, and can assure you that teachers decide what is in the classrooms, not IT. If the Teachers want something, IT is charged with making it happen.
We used to support a school in the area... I'm very glad we don't anymore. What a headache... Every teacher had different requirements for their classes... Often to the point that we'd have to support two different, yet nearly identical pieces of software just because one teacher liked one program more than the other. There was one piece of software...don't remember what it was...it required write access to all sorts of registry keys... Basically would not run as anything less than administrator... We had a hell of a time locking down those computers.
WiFi refreshes so often that most people dont notice the significant proformance drop
their internet connection is almost always the real choke point anyways.
I guess it really depends on what you're trying to do with your WLAN. Sure, if you're just using it to surf porn at home then I guess it doesn't matter much... But I support a few medical offices and I cringe every time someone mentions wireless. It's hard to get a good signal, it's even harder to keep a solid connection throughout the day. When you've got doctors roaming from one office to the next all day long, trying to pull up charts and test results, trying to dictate or pull up scans...the Internet connection is most certainly not the choke point. And just when you've finally got everything working the way it should someone in a near-by office will go and pick up a brand new 2.4 Ghz phone and throw it all off again.
I'm not a programmer, so feel free to ignore me, but it seems to me that this shouldn't really be something that an application developer should have to deal with. It seems to me that the OS and most programming languages should have ample support for multithreading by now... I remember learning about and writing multithreaded programs back when I was in college - about 10 years ago.
Sure, at the time most everything we wrong was executed on a single core CPU so it wasn't actually parallel programming...it all ran in serial anyway... But you could still write a multithreaded program that'd let you do one thing while the rest of your program was working on something else. It seems like those separate threads ought to just wind up executing on multiple cores now, and actually execute simultaneously.
Obviously this won't fix every problem out there... I'm sure there's plenty of algorithms that would really benefit from being re-examined... And at a certain point you just run out of different things to do at once... But are the OSes and programming languages still so serial in design?
Plus, to be completely honest, I'm not sure how much parallel processing is going to do for your average user. It seems like most applications wind up waiting for something other than the CPU these days... It seems to me that more time would be wasted waiting on I/O or other hardware than the CPU... Maybe that's not true at the server, but it certainly is on the desktop.
A more interesting and likely scenario is tech improvements to sex toys. Imagine what something like Real Doll will be in 10 or 15 years time, and it's not much of a stretch to say you could have a sizeable portion of the population abandoning the dating scene. We already see that in small numbers due to webcams, and it seems reasonable to extrapolate the trend accelerating with accelerated improvements to the tech.
We already have people who are falling in love with their Real Dolls. There's a documentary available somewhere on the web, but I'm too lazy to go looking for it. These folks attribute thoughts, emotions, and opinions to their dolls that they are completely and totally incapable of displaying. Just imagine what you'd see if you put a few motors and microchips into a Real Doll so that it could smile or talk.
It won't take much before we see people "falling in love" with robots.
No, no. This is an employment issue. You could lose your job for "pushing back." Some people don't have that option.
All employment is voluntary, in both directions. You work for your employer as long as it seems to be to your advantage, and your employer keeps you for as long as it seems to be to their advantage. If you don't like the terms of your employment - salary too low, hours too long, whatever - renegotiate or leave. If your employer's demands are genuinely unreasonable then they'll soon find the position unfilled and unfillable.
Everyone always has the same choice, no matter how dire your straights. You always have the option of pushing back, even at the expense of your job. Whether that choice is worthwhile or not is entirely up to you - but it's still your choice to make.
But isn't it your job to be on the other end of the phone to answer a question in ten minutes that would take me an hour to figure out by reading the poorly-written book? If not then why am I paying for support?
That is certainly true. The productive, money-making people in a company need to be back up and running as soon as possible. It isn't their job to stay up to date on the latest viruses and patches out there. It isn't their job to keep the machines running. It is their job to make the phone calls, make the sales, meet the people, whatever - and anything that keeps them from doing their job for even a minute is a bad thing. That is all very true.
However, it is also true that users could often solve their own problems in even less time than it takes to dial the phone if they were willing to simply read the messages on their screen.
I had a user call me up because there was a weird picture bouncing around their screen... A green and red box with some text in it... And they couldn't do anything with their computer. I asked them what the text said - "No video signal, check the cable." I asked them to check the cable connecting their screen to their PC - "hey, it's all wiggly... the picture's back!" I had them tighten the thumbscrews and then hung up. If they'd actually read that error message they could have checked that cable without me telling them to. I did not have to coach them through which cable was which or anything, they were smart enough to follow the cable from the screen to the PC. But they didn't even read the message.
I've also had people call me up because they got some weird message on their screen, or a pop-up, or something like that - and all it was is a Windows Update letting them know that they needed to reboot or something similar. Again, read the message. "Windows Update has completed and needs to restart the computer." You don't need me to translate that for you. Some people really do need to invest some time developing basic reading/comprehension skills.
No, but it throws a BIGGER monkey wrench in the theory of (global warming) == (bad for life on earth)
I'm not sure how this has anything to do with global warming at all, much less whether it is good or bad for life on earth. When those dinosaurs were roaming around Antarctica it wasn't Antarctica at all - the continents weren't anywhere near where they are. The ice and snow came much later. So whatever global climate conditions we have today have very little to do with dinosaur remains and where they're found.
unless of course mankind existed before dinosaurs, and we drove our SUV's until they all died from CO2 overdose and the SUV's disintegrated completely (even the plastics) but the dinosaur bones remained... Which means Al Gore has reincarnated to save the poor dinosaurs agai... oh wait, they're not around. Tough tamales, eh?
Is this even related to your first statement? Did you just wander off on a tangent? What does human influence, or lack there-of, have to do with whether global warming is good or bad for life on earth?
It seems that the customer would be less unhappy about a warning that he is about to reach a bandwidth cap, page modifications and all, than just get a thousand dollar bill out of the blue. There is no set mechanism for the ISP to communicate with the customer over Internet, so creating one might be justifiable in this case. Write again when a (non-free) ISP injects ads or blocks competitor's websites.
There's plenty of ways for the ISP to communicate with the customer - both over the Internet and other means. They could send out an email to the customer when they get near their limit. They could provide bandwidth details and limits on some customer-accessible website. They could release a small application that monitors the customer's bandwidth usage. They could give the customer a call, or automate a call system. All of which would let the customer know that they're nearing or exceeding their bandwidth cap without having to modify anyone's HTTP.
I don't care how good the intention is, they're modifying someone else's HTTP. It's only a matter of time before their injected code messes up a website somewhere. I'm sure banks just love the idea of ISPs attempting to inject code into their on-line banking systems. I wonder how the various anti-fraud/anti-phishing utilities respond to this? How long until somebody clicks a link and installs something horrible because the injected banner across the top said "Rogers" and they thought it was safe?
I would love to see end to end encryption become standard. I know that it creates overhead, and as the admin of several small websites, I know the implementation can take longer, but I would still like it to become standard.
Agreed. I don't want anyone messing with my websites. If I load up Slashdot, I want to see what Slashdot published on their site. I don't want any additional banners/ads/whatever...I don't want text selectively changed... I want to see Slashdot. And when I publish a website I want to know that visitors are seeing what I published, not what their ISP thinks they should see.
The only way that ISPs could then exert control would be through messing with DNS records and redirects, which has far larger implementations. OpenDNS anyone?
Our regional cable ISP started manipulating DNS not too long ago, so we started switching people over to OpenDNS. But lately they've started playing with SMTP. You have to use the ISP's SMTP server unless you're a "business" customer...and of course their SMTP server will only relay for their own mail addresses. So we've had a lot of angry home users who can't use their email accounts. Hooray for webmail!
So, he was telling me that he figured he could get 2 GB of RAM and 500GB HD for $150. At first, I didn't believe him; then I checked prices, then I almost fell over.
It's been ages since I built a PC for home use... Normally I just throw a list of requirements together and then hand it off to someone else to quote out the appropriate stuff... So I'm fairly out of touch with prices...
I was recently looking on NewEgg for some upgrades to my woefully out of date gaming PC and was absolutely shocked at the price of RAM. I can get 4 GB today for less than what it cost me for 1 GB last time I upgraded.
CompUSA used to be the only halfway-decent place to buy computer hardware and software for miles around. Best Buy had some...Circuit City had some...but CompUSA was about the only place where I could routinely find what I wanted/needed. These days more and more hardware and software is being stocked just about everywhere - Best Buy and Circuit City have much better selections, Office Max and Staples are carrying some, even Wal-Mart sells some basic stuff. And for anything I can't get locally I can get it in just a couple days from any number of on-line retailers. CompUSA's niche has shrunk or vanished, and they haven't changed to fit the market.
It's really going to depend on what the goal is that you're trying to accomplish...
If you just want to teach the concepts behind page layout, design, image composition, etc. you'll probably want to use more than just software. Give them a camera, a dark room, have them do some old school copy & paste. Teach them the concepts and then the digital tools they choose won't matter so much, as long as the tool does what they need it to.
If you're teaching towards something specific, like being a web designer, then you'll want to aim more for what they're likely to use. Teaching someone to use GIMP isn't going to do much good if there's a 90% chance their job will have them using Photoshop instead.
If it's supposed to be some kind of multimedia software overview type class then you'll want to try a little bit of everything. Teach Photoshop, but teach GIMP as well. Demonstrate what each tool does well or not-so-well.
10 metres away though what kind of material? 10 metres away through air wouldn't surprise me. However, in my apartment building, there's concrete floors/ceilings. How easily would the signal travel through that?
The article doesn't say, but I would assume that it was air. Of course other materials are going to cut down signal strength... So maybe you only get 5 meters instead of 10 - depending on where your computer is physically located that can still put the snooper on the other side of a wall. And again, that's with a simple receiver, nothing fancy or directional or anything. Sure, if you're burried in a concrete bunker you're probably OK, but if you've got windows near your PC or if you're in a cube farm there's a very real possibility of people snooping on you and staying relatively hidden.
And if the whole process is as simple as they make it sound, I doubt if it will be long before we see wireless keylogger devices similar to those available for wired keyboards already. Only you wouldn't actually have to plug anything into the PC...just drop some little battery-powered device in a drawer or waste basket near the PC, and pick it up a few hours/days later.
wouldn't the hacker have to be you know, under your nose quite literally, to intercept the signals from your keyboard?
TFA says they were able to snoop from up to 10 meters away with a "simple radio receiver". That's not too bad. 10 meters could easily put you in a different room, on a different floor, or outside. And that's just with a basic antenna... Put together something more directional and I'm sure you could get more distance. Definitely enough to snoop on someone from the office/apartment next to you.
If someone has the clear text at any time, or the decryption key at any time, you are implicitly trusting them with that data.
Exactly. If you're already trusting Google to do the encryption or hang on to the key or whatever...then why bother having them encrypt it in the first place? Your privacy has already been compromised and you're already relying on Google to do what they claim they're going to do. If you are genuinely concerned about about your security/privacy then you aren't going to want to rely on Google for any of it - encrypt your own files, with whatever software you trust, and then upload them.
PS. Public folders have gone away in Exchange 2007; big mistake if you ask me. It was a selling point for Exchange.
They aren't quite gone yet... Exchange 2007's GUI has absolutely no tools for managing Public Folders, but you can still manipulate them through PowerShell - and MS claims that GUI tools for Public Folders are on the way in SP1. Or, if you're desperate for a GUI right now, you can install Exchange 2000/2003 management tools.
Microsoft has stated, repeatedly and loudly, that Public Folders are on the way out. If I had to guess, I'd say that they're likely moving that kind of functionality into a new/different product - something like SharePoint maybe.
wireless is typically far cheaper because the installation costs are zero.
Sure, in theory, it's cheaper because you don't have to sling cables/dig trenches/whatever... But in practice I've found it usually costs just as much as a wired installation, if not more.
Wireless if fickle. You'll have a great connection in one room and then it'll go to hell in the next. You'll be fine with five users connected and then it'll go to hell when a sixth connects. The weather affects signal strength, as do human bodies, and furniture, and anything else that gets between you and the AP. It's hard to deliver consistent wireless connectivity.
With a wired network you can install a single switch and run cables out to fairly distant locations... With wireless, you need an AP within reach of each device connecting... And then you've still got to get the APs connected back to your router - typically with a wire.
But he sounds pretty sure they will get there eventually.
If there's a real desire to get there, it'll happen. We know it can be done, that's been proven. Sure, there's a lot of work ahead of China... Plenty of R&D... But it can be done. And if China as a nation wants to put a man on the moon, there's no good reason they won't be able to.
That's what's missing here in the U.S. - desire. Folks don't seem to care much about NASA/space anymore, and funding keeps getting cut.
But what with the potential for high level mischief using the component parts in there let's hope that they don't hit 'mainstream' any time soon.
Bah! Personally, I'd love to see these things enter into mainstream use - the sooner, the better. I'm sick of paying craptons to get from one place to another, or to keep my home warm in the winter, when we have alternatives like this that are possible with current technology. Here in the U.S. we're so terrified of anything nuclear that we keep guzzling oil/coal like there's no tomorrow.
As for the security issues... Sure, I guess somebody should keep tabs on these things... But I'm no more worried about one of these than a truck full of fertilizer and fuel oil. And I somehow think it'd be easier to come up with the fertilizer and fuel oil than it would be to dismantle and weaponize one of these things.
My wireless card from 2004 still doesn't work properly, I don't think support for it is going to be better in '08.
Drivers have always been a manufacturer issue. There isn't a whole lot the OS developers can do if the device manufacturer doesn't make a driver. Sure, if they release the specs it's possible for someone else to write a driver... But a lot of manufacturers don't do this either. If you pay attention when shopping around for hardware you'll see that there are plenty of devices, including wireless cards, that have drivers included for Linux.
So, why will Linux's wireless support be better in 2008? Did something in the industry change?
On the Linux side of things there's been steady work to make wireless support easier to develop. There's a new 802.11 stack that makes wireless drivers quite a bit easier to develop.
If you look at the industry in general, Linux has continued to gain ground and is now present in more computers than ever before - giving manufacturers more incentive to develop their own Linux drivers.
And wi-fi is, itself, more common. Just about any laptop you buy has it built in and it's hard to find a low-end router without it.
Currently AMD is producing excellent products in the midrange market segment (where almost everyone actually buys stuff)
For my customers, I price out whatever meets their needs. We sell plenty of AMD machines and usually the video card doesn't matter at all. For myself, I do a lot of gaming, so I am not generally looking at midrange stuff - hence my preference for Intel/nVidia at the moment.
I do, at least if it's so samall it's not an encumbrance: you'd be considerably less likely to put it down and then leave it on a train or in a taxi. One of the guys here wears one like a pendant. Unless he intentionally takes it off it stays so long as his head does.
I guess that could work... Personally, I've lost more flash sticks than I can count. It's a good thing I don't keep anything important on them...
Long story short: AMD, thank you very much for trying, I'll stay with, and continue recommending, Intel/nVidia.
Gotta love competition.
A few years back I was a big fan of AMD/ATI for gaming. You could get a blazing fast CPU/GPU for quite a bit less than Intel and nVidia were offering. Left you money to throw into fancy cases, ginormous power supplies, light-up fans, big-ass monitors...
These days I'm not so impressed with AMD or ATI. AMD is still making decent processors, but they don't seem to be top of the heap anymore. The price difference isn't that great between Intel and AMD, and Intel really seems to be turning out a better product. ATI... Well, I'm just kind of disgusted at ATI right now. Their hardware seems OK, but I really don't like the driver architecture. Don't like the fact that I have to download and install.Net separately.
These days I'm recommending Intel/nVidia to anyone interested in gaming - due largely to the fact that AMD and ATI kicked Intel's and nVidia's asses for a while... And I'm sure that eventually AMD/ATI will make a comeback, and I'll wind up using their hardware again. Back and forth...and in the end the one who really wins is the customer...
If they wanted a local copy, they could store it on a external USB drive and carry that around in their pocket whenever they had to leave the laptop behind.
Seems to me it would be even easier to lose a tiny little thumb drive with incredibly valuable data on it than an entire laptop... Unless it was maybe attached to them with some like of a locking lanyard/bracelet type thing. But I don't really see how moving it to an even smaller and more portable media would make it less likely to get lost.
Even better, can't they just have an encrypted VPN from their home office to their work place?
This is exactly what they should be doing. Keep all the data in a central location, never let it leave the building, and if you need to access it remotely you can do so with a VPN. That's what we do for our customer documentation... It all stays on the server and if you need to look something up you log in with a VPN. And we're just a little IT shop in the middle of nowhere...you'd think Government Agencies would have figured this out.
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I'm not a programmer, so feel free to ignore me, but it seems to me that this shouldn't really be something that an application developer should have to deal with. It seems to me that the OS and most programming languages should have ample support for multithreading by now... I remember learning about and writing multithreaded programs back when I was in college - about 10 years ago.
Sure, at the time most everything we wrong was executed on a single core CPU so it wasn't actually parallel programming...it all ran in serial anyway... But you could still write a multithreaded program that'd let you do one thing while the rest of your program was working on something else. It seems like those separate threads ought to just wind up executing on multiple cores now, and actually execute simultaneously.
Obviously this won't fix every problem out there... I'm sure there's plenty of algorithms that would really benefit from being re-examined... And at a certain point you just run out of different things to do at once... But are the OSes and programming languages still so serial in design?
Plus, to be completely honest, I'm not sure how much parallel processing is going to do for your average user. It seems like most applications wind up waiting for something other than the CPU these days... It seems to me that more time would be wasted waiting on I/O or other hardware than the CPU... Maybe that's not true at the server, but it certainly is on the desktop.
It won't take much before we see people "falling in love" with robots.
Everyone always has the same choice, no matter how dire your straights. You always have the option of pushing back, even at the expense of your job. Whether that choice is worthwhile or not is entirely up to you - but it's still your choice to make.
However, it is also true that users could often solve their own problems in even less time than it takes to dial the phone if they were willing to simply read the messages on their screen.
I had a user call me up because there was a weird picture bouncing around their screen... A green and red box with some text in it... And they couldn't do anything with their computer. I asked them what the text said - "No video signal, check the cable." I asked them to check the cable connecting their screen to their PC - "hey, it's all wiggly
I've also had people call me up because they got some weird message on their screen, or a pop-up, or something like that - and all it was is a Windows Update letting them know that they needed to reboot or something similar. Again, read the message. "Windows Update has completed and needs to restart the computer." You don't need me to translate that for you. Some people really do need to invest some time developing basic reading/comprehension skills.
I don't care how good the intention is, they're modifying someone else's HTTP. It's only a matter of time before their injected code messes up a website somewhere. I'm sure banks just love the idea of ISPs attempting to inject code into their on-line banking systems. I wonder how the various anti-fraud/anti-phishing utilities respond to this? How long until somebody clicks a link and installs something horrible because the injected banner across the top said "Rogers" and they thought it was safe?
I was recently looking on NewEgg for some upgrades to my woefully out of date gaming PC and was absolutely shocked at the price of RAM. I can get 4 GB today for less than what it cost me for 1 GB last time I upgraded.
CompUSA used to be the only halfway-decent place to buy computer hardware and software for miles around. Best Buy had some...Circuit City had some...but CompUSA was about the only place where I could routinely find what I wanted/needed. These days more and more hardware and software is being stocked just about everywhere - Best Buy and Circuit City have much better selections, Office Max and Staples are carrying some, even Wal-Mart sells some basic stuff. And for anything I can't get locally I can get it in just a couple days from any number of on-line retailers. CompUSA's niche has shrunk or vanished, and they haven't changed to fit the market.
It's really going to depend on what the goal is that you're trying to accomplish...
If you just want to teach the concepts behind page layout, design, image composition, etc. you'll probably want to use more than just software. Give them a camera, a dark room, have them do some old school copy & paste. Teach them the concepts and then the digital tools they choose won't matter so much, as long as the tool does what they need it to.
If you're teaching towards something specific, like being a web designer, then you'll want to aim more for what they're likely to use. Teaching someone to use GIMP isn't going to do much good if there's a 90% chance their job will have them using Photoshop instead.
If it's supposed to be some kind of multimedia software overview type class then you'll want to try a little bit of everything. Teach Photoshop, but teach GIMP as well. Demonstrate what each tool does well or not-so-well.
And if the whole process is as simple as they make it sound, I doubt if it will be long before we see wireless keylogger devices similar to those available for wired keyboards already. Only you wouldn't actually have to plug anything into the PC...just drop some little battery-powered device in a drawer or waste basket near the PC, and pick it up a few hours/days later.
Microsoft has stated, repeatedly and loudly, that Public Folders are on the way out. If I had to guess, I'd say that they're likely moving that kind of functionality into a new/different product - something like SharePoint maybe.
Wireless if fickle. You'll have a great connection in one room and then it'll go to hell in the next. You'll be fine with five users connected and then it'll go to hell when a sixth connects. The weather affects signal strength, as do human bodies, and furniture, and anything else that gets between you and the AP. It's hard to deliver consistent wireless connectivity.
With a wired network you can install a single switch and run cables out to fairly distant locations... With wireless, you need an AP within reach of each device connecting... And then you've still got to get the APs connected back to your router - typically with a wire.
That's what's missing here in the U.S. - desire. Folks don't seem to care much about NASA/space anymore, and funding keeps getting cut.
As for the security issues... Sure, I guess somebody should keep tabs on these things... But I'm no more worried about one of these than a truck full of fertilizer and fuel oil. And I somehow think it'd be easier to come up with the fertilizer and fuel oil than it would be to dismantle and weaponize one of these things.
If you look at the industry in general, Linux has continued to gain ground and is now present in more computers than ever before - giving manufacturers more incentive to develop their own Linux drivers.
And wi-fi is, itself, more common. Just about any laptop you buy has it built in and it's hard to find a low-end router without it.
A few years back I was a big fan of AMD/ATI for gaming. You could get a blazing fast CPU/GPU for quite a bit less than Intel and nVidia were offering. Left you money to throw into fancy cases, ginormous power supplies, light-up fans, big-ass monitors...
These days I'm not so impressed with AMD or ATI. AMD is still making decent processors, but they don't seem to be top of the heap anymore. The price difference isn't that great between Intel and AMD, and Intel really seems to be turning out a better product. ATI... Well, I'm just kind of disgusted at ATI right now. Their hardware seems OK, but I really don't like the driver architecture. Don't like the fact that I have to download and install
These days I'm recommending Intel/nVidia to anyone interested in gaming - due largely to the fact that AMD and ATI kicked Intel's and nVidia's asses for a while... And I'm sure that eventually AMD/ATI will make a comeback, and I'll wind up using their hardware again. Back and forth...and in the end the one who really wins is the customer...