This is not the fault of the currency. It is a fault of the exchange provider and the users of the currency really need to be careful in who they put their trust.
But, that's the problem.
In the real world, banks are regulated, covered under some oversight, and insured.
If this parallel banking system doesn't have any of these controls, then there's simply no way you can trust the system as a whole.
So, me, I'll stick to having my money backed by real banks, with an actual transaction processing backed by major players, and which all of the players understand the risks and their own liability.
Trusting the internet with my money is like trusting a crackhead to guard my house. What you're describing is that any idiot can come along and try to get into the game. No thanks.
This may not be a specific issue with the currency, but the entire "banking" ecosystem around it sounds like something I'd fundamentally have zero trust in.
The actual Bitcoin protocol looks quite secure, it's just that every website using it seems to be run by the kind of people I wouldn't trust with a toaster oven.
But, that's kind of the core of the problem.
In the real world, the banking and trading system is monitored by people with the power to enforce, have long histories and memories of what can go wrong, and is generally policed by governments cooperating.
But the internet equivalent makes it sound like a bunch of shady, back alley people doing financial transactions outside of the normal system.
So for me, there's simply no basis to trust "Bob's online brokerage and clearing house for virtual currency", or the entire BitCoin system.
Much like PayPal isn't a bank, but does many bank-like things -- it isn't regulated like a bank, and doesn't offer you the same legal protections. It's hard not to see this as more of the same -- but since the currency still has real world value, people will treat it as such. The tendency to lie, cheat and steal doesn't go away because it's virtual currency.
For God's sake, the largest Bitcoin exchange is MTGox. That's the site formerly known as "Magic The Gathering Online Exchange".
LOL, like I said, "Bob's online brokerage"... why should I trust them? They're completely unregulated, outside of the normal banking system, and not really accountable to anybody. What could possibly go wrong?
I view this as being pretty close to walking up to someone running a lemon-aid stand who claims to be a bank, and depositing a bunch of money. When the guy with the lemon-aid stand proves to have little or no security, or is completely dishonest... well, good luck getting your money back.
I'm not really surprised by this. Someone had the idea to create a purely virtual currency, and someone else has found it to be an attractive target.
The fact that it is vulnerable to this kind of attack probably indicates there's some real flaws in how this currency is supposed to work -- or at least a few places where someone can get through the cracks.
I remember when I first started hearing about this, and thinking "gee, I hope they've thought through all of the security issues". It's like security in operating systems... there's tons of things you could overlook which can let someone in, and until it starts happening, you likely haven't even thought of all of them.
I feel bad for anybody has lost their money on this, but I've been treating this like an experiment which has the potential to go really wrong. It's just so massively complex to try to design your own currency system that someone isn't going to try to exploit without going through a lot of growing pains.
How should a non-commercial mod team go about obtaining such permission, practically?
Do they need such permission?
Serious question: does the fact that someone owns the movie rights to these films preclude someone from doing an artistic work which is inspired from the books as long as they're not using someone else's copyrighted material or using their designs?
There is a truly huge amount of artwork inspired by Tolkien's books, much of which was drawn on for inspiration for the movies.
Much like Disney can't stop you from making stories based on the same stories as they did (providing it isn't using their images and the like), I am puzzled they could even possibly have the right to say "You can't make something set in Middle Earth, we own all of it".
In other Skyrim news, a mod for the game that attempted to recreate J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle Earth has received a Cease & Desist letter from Warner Bros, causing development to stop.
This sounds like a gross abuse. Unless they actually used images from the films or made it look too much like the films... the sheer amount of artwork imagining Middle Earth was already vast when I played D&D in the 80s.
There's no way Warner Bros has the rights to all artistic works related to that. They may have the film rights, but I seriously doubt that precludes anybody from trying to do artwork featuring Gandalf and Elves and the like.
Hell, the actual map was in the books... it's not like it's a secret, and it's not like they created it. All this IP crap is getting ridiculous.
Obviously they can't afford to fight this. Sad there doesn't seem to be a link to the actual C&D letter (at least that I can see)... I'd be curious to see what they're claiming. I'd be willing to bet they're on some shaky footing with whatever assertions they've made.
Apple's new internal motto: Mac OS X isn't done until SkyDrive won't run.
Given Microsoft's long and storied history of writing software for platforms that aren't theirs.. they may do that on their own.
Other than Office for the Mac, which last I heard is largely neglected and not well maintained, I'm not sure I can think of a single application Microsoft ever wrote from scratch with the intent of supporting operating systems other than their own. And definitely not multiple platforms with the same thing.
I'm sure there are examples I just don't know of, but Microsoft hasn't traditionally made a practice of writing code for other environments. I'm sure they have the resources for it, but they don't really have a history of doing it.
I fear in the end they might end up just buying someone who has already taken a stab at it and getting them to retool to their protocols. But, hey, they might surprise us and do something really cool.
But there might be a large percentage of people with Apple devices who ask themselves "why on Earth would I want this from Microsoft?". In which case, this might be doomed to indifference.
The problem with trying to create something like this, is I'm not sure that Silicon Valley was 'created' per se.
It seems like it happened because you had a couple of companies (HP for example) who set up shop there, and then other stuff grew around it. I'm not sure you could just go out and say "OK, we'll put a center of innovation and technology here".
It sort of has to grow organically I should think.
I used to work with someone who grew up in what is now Silicon Valley. He said at the time, it was a very not fancy suburb of San Francisco, but that over the years it changed into what it is now, with the crazy real estate prices and everything else to go with it.
It just seems like more of a historical accident than something you can plan for. Sure, you can try to entice people to go there, and possibly even give some perks for doing it. But that doesn't seem like it is going to give you all that much chance of success.
Cities occasionally decide they want to become hubs of this kind of stuff, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're going to achieve this.
Right now I have about 6 different types of chargers, each plugged in in various places around the house.
I have tried very hard to make sure the things I buy that need charging will mostly charge off of USB of some sort.
I've got a really nice Kensington charger with 4 USB ports that covers most of what I need.
My two cameras each have a dedicated charger, but the rest of my electronic devices can get handled with that. It really does cut down on the number of chargers you need to keep around. It also makes travel easier since it will handle any currents in use (110/220V, 50/60Hz), and I only need to bring it, and the appropriate cables.
Intuitively it seems ludicrous that reducing production would decrease the marginal cost.
I think the theory goes that by the time you're retiring a product (unless it was a complete flop), you're likely to have recouped the start-up and development costs, and then the cost of units after a certain point get cheaper per unit and you flip over into the black.
If the product was successful, you recoup your costs from the first units, and then start becoming profitable. Over time, by the time you're well into production, the unit cost of each item drops (because you account for your costs first).
Of course, if you lose money from the start, never sell enough units to recoup your costs... well, then you have a net loss.
Nothing radical is being proposed here unless Amazon really shot themselves in the foot.
Some even continue to sell the old model afterwards as a budget model.
ie. They lose money.
Or gain market share.
In the case of a Kindle, the expectation is you'll be buying eBooks from Amazon.
The reality is, selling it at a loss is better than having unsold inventory you'll never sell anyway. So you might as well sell at a discount and recoup *some* of your costs, or you just end up with junk and recover none of your costs.
Conceptually I unfortunately get that some people just want to dominate and oppress. But, and I may be thinking too highly of myself here, I'd like to believe that if I was the "supreme dictator" somewhere that my country would be awesome.
Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.
History has surprisingly few benevolent dictators, unfortunately.
In fact vmware vmotion is actually is more robust than anything i've seen on z.
Well, I'd certainly believe that vmware has gotten a lot right. I haven't worked in a place that doesn't have a large vmware infrastructure in quite some time.
This is actually, where your sorta right. Like any other software project migrations of proprietary apps can be extremely painful. That said, lots of times, the migrations are failing not because of the migration itself, but that people are trying to fix all the problems with the mainframe software at the same time.
Well, the ones I worked on had been written in the 60s. Yes, we were trying to give them modern GUIs and the like, but the longer we worked with it, the more we kept coming back to things that they swore up front would never ever happen, and that happened all over the place. So even just trying to get all of the little undocumented bits and corner cases was proving to be an impossible task. The software was also used for keeping track of some very large and complicated bits of machinery (all I can really say about that), some of which literally had 40 years worth of data associated with them, some newer. None of the assumptions they told us to build the system on proved to be true as we got deeper, which made attempts to adjust our system impossible (we had built lots of stuff to preclude what was subsequently shown to be normal data).
One of my previous jobs was similar, we would walk in with a pair of x86 servers and replace a 7-8 figure mainframe. Our whole solution cost less than a month of maintenance, not counting the army of support personnel, maintenance, licensing, etc.
I will have to take you at your word for that. The people I've known who still have contact with mainframes are quite insistent that you could never get anywhere close to the performance of a mainframe with a couple of x86 boxes. Maybe for some apps, but certainly not across the spectrum of what they use them for.
It just seems implausible to me that people would still be buying these things if they could replace it that easily... it actually boggles the mind to think that. Otherwise everyone would have done that by now.
These are actual enterprise apps like you'd see in a fortune 500? Or departmental solutions? Like I said, the last thing I'd expect is that you can truly replace those beasties with a couple of PCs -- if for nothing else, the reliability and uptime you can get.
The only industries I've ever been involved in that use them treat the 7-figure maintenance on them to be cost of doing business, because they have more zeroes in their daily stuff. Hell, the machines alone cost 9-figures, and over their lifetime affected at least one or two more digits.
5.5Ghz probably makes it about as fast as a 2 year old intel machine. I should know, I have a z114 (previous generation at 3.8Ghz) that i've done extensive benchmarks on. The fact that IBM refuses to publish standard benchmark numbers (specCPU, specVM, etc) should be sufficient proof that they are not pretty.
I can say that the people buying these things are pretty much smoking some fine IBM drugs
I'm quite sure that for the applications people actually use mainframes for, you're utterly wrong.
Not only do they scale massively higher in terms of throughput, they also manage to do it with obscene uptimes (measured in years) and reliability nothing can compare to.
For certain kinds of applications, what you say is largely true. But at the huge end for things like banking, financial transactions, and airline reservations... there's really no comparison.
The maintenance costs alone over ten years is going to save 7 figure sums, which should more more than enough to hire a couple programmers and a system administrator to port and maintain the apps on a machine that costs $20k every 5 years.
I've worked on projects trying to do exactly this. And I've seen a couple of them fail.
Trying to map out all of the use cases for software which is mission critical and has been around since the 60's can actually prove to be exceedingly challenging if not impossible.
I'm just not convinced that for the kinds of applications and environments where people will run mainframes that what you suggest would give the same performance or scalability as a big giant mainframe. There just seems to be something missing from that picture, and to me it's the sheer volume of stuff these things handle. Certainly not even in the same category as what you call a midrange desktop.
...gives me a bit of a cognitive dissonance sensation. It shouldn't, really, but it does. Is it just me?
It may not be just you. But I think a lot of people really have no idea of just how many mainframes are still chugging away doing what they've always done.
My wife does outsourced SAN storage, and they still have a couple of clients with big iron running.
Every couple of years when everybody has forgotten about the machines, an IBM tech will call up and say that the machine has phoned home and has a part that needs to be swapped out and that he needs to go onsite. Which usually leads to several hours of people trying to remember what it is and where it is (except the guys who work in the data center, who can't miss it).
I've worked in several places that have had mainframes for literally decades. And I've even worked on a project or two which tried to replace ancient, purpose built software with some shiny new stuff. In the cases I've seen, after spending a few years a a few million dollars... they still can't replace the mainframe and scrap the project.
I knew someone in the early 2000's who had retired from his job with a full pension, and was back as a consultant making at least 3x his old salary because they no longer could find someone who knew the machines and the software like he did.
Mainframes haven't gone away. Not by any stretch. And I bet this one still runs the stuff from the IBM 360 days quite nicely.
I think it depends on how well you can manage with your left hand.
My brother is a lefty, and in school he was practically forced to try to learn to write with his left hand until they got over it. He's fairly dextrous with both hands, and actually golfs like a righty.
But I know my DSLR camera and several electronic gadgets is set up nicely for a right handed person, and would likely be a pain for a lefty.
In my case, my left hand has never had much fine dexterity. So if I was suddenly forced to do things left handed, I'd be screwed. And if you gave me an SLR with the controls and shutter button on the left, well, I likely couldn't use it.
I think lefties have just had to adapt more, and I assume that not as many of them have a right hand which is as useless as my left. There's nothing wrong with my left hand, but really fine motor skills isn't something I've ever been able to make it do; it's just not there.
I can definitely see how a lefty confronted with a can opener or something might be in for some nuisance if they can't do as much with their right hand.
The sort who can sort of program but aren't really that good. Two of them together usually add up to one good programmer. Two good programmers often add up to a great programmer, but the great programmers often move quickly enough that there is little or no benefit to their pairing. Just sit them really near each other.
You have to work at it (and that implies being willing to), and I would agree that for every single task it might be a bit much.
But, many years ago I worked with a team of other coders, and we worked together for quite a few years. We developed our own style where mostly people were heads down, but if you ran into a problem or a question, you just called out the name of the guy next to you and then scrummed. We'd sometimes pair code for specific things, often discuss what we were doing, do frequent code reviews and walk-throughs, and go to a whiteboard at the drop of a hat. Overall it created a good balance between getting out the main body of it, and making sure we understood all of the fiddly bits.
Fast forward, and I don't write code so much any more. But on a project I was working on last year (a giant software upgrade with loads of machines, components, databases) we really needed to be sure it was Done Right Every Time. So, we basically adapted pair programming, and set it up so we had a plan, a checklist, and two people. someone was always verifying what was being done, and prompting for the next things. Admittedly, this started with two people who had been doing this kind of stuff for years and worked well together, but we brought in and trained up some new resources using the same thing.
As we went on and I explained to people why I insisted on doing it that way, we ramped up the team so we could have two 8 hour shifts (we only had a 3 day weekend to do the actual go-live). By the time we were ready to do the final upgrade of the production environment, we did it smoothly, and actually in about only 80% of the projected time. The PMs were really pleased, and management was ecstatic.
You're absolutely correct that it won't fix every problem you have, and doesn't help in every situation... but it's just another thing in the list of how you can go about getting things done right, accurately, and with some certainty that it's been given as much neurons as it could.
It's never a bad thing to know your options. I've had positive results in both writing code and system deployments. But I've also seen it done horribly bad, which didn't really improve anything, and in some cases, seems to have made it worse.
In my experience, coders who like to do clever tricky things don't do well in this situation. But, in my experience those guys can also be a liability in writing code as they just want to bode up something which isn't maintainable, which which they think is 'cool'.
Me, I find there's an awful lot of situations in which a second set of eyes (and another whole brain) can really improve outcomes.
Your doing it wrong. Watch the video. Pair programming is not 69. Your head should be next to his head. Not near his ass (because then he will smell your farts too, and one of you would have his hands under the keyboard...).
You seem to be laboring under the impression that teh Sphere of Stink of a fart is limited to mere inches.
Trust me, if you're within a 12-15 foot radius of me, you're gonna get it.:-P
Is there a reason your father MUST be on Windows? Is he primarily browsing and using office productivity applications? If he does not have specific requirements (such as gaming, high end graphics/video production, ect) then he should not be running Windows to begin with.
Good luck with that.
Many of us who have parents are are getting a little older have to deal with this kind of stuff. They're often not very computer savvy, and don't have the natural paranoia many of us have developed.
But they're going to want to maybe run tax software, the software for their camera, maybe run Office, maybe sync their eBook and a few other things. They're not going to be interested in running Linux, because the first thing they try to install that doesn't work they're going to be pissed off. I wouldn't foist Linux on my parents, and having seen the software they use, Linux wouldn't really be suitable for them. Because they do just enough as to make Linux more trouble than it's worth because there are things they need to do you can't do on Linux at all, and other things for which there is a piece of software which does most of what you want, but not al of it.
When my parents got their PC a couple of years ago, I sat them down and explained to them how you shouldn't always trust the internet, you definitely shouldn't trust someone calling you out of the blue claiming to be... well, anybody really unless you can confirm it, and that I live sufficiently far enough away that being their tech support isn't practical. So they really needed to take to heart the risks.
Once I'd impressed upon them just how serious I was and what could go wrong, they then went forth with an understanding that they need to keep their wits about them. They've learned to be wary of unsolicited calls, and never to discuss any of that stuff unless they initiated the conversation with a number they verified from an official location.
Giving out personal info to strangers is insane.
Have you met any older people? I'm talking anywhere between 60 and 90. Many of them simply never developed the kind of watchfulness we have, and impressing upon them how important it is.
My great aunt in her late 90's fell for a couple of scams here and there (chump change, really). The problem was that somehow they figured out that if they could imply they were from her church then she'd be likely to open her wallet to them.
It's, for lack of a better word, that they're not sophisticated/worldly/cynical enough about people. Given how often I get calls from people claiming to be all sorts of things, I can completely see how someone who is in their 70's just don't realize to not trust someone by default. If you grew up in a rural area, or grew up before TV... that level of distrust is just not natural to you.
Even a lot of the media targeted towards seniors try to give good coverage of the issues here. But you'd be surprised at how many older people really don't know what we consider to be fairly basic stuff.
Hell, I've gotten to the point that if I don't immediately recognize the phone number, I simply don't answer since most of my incoming calls are fraudulent. It's just like spam, cast a wide enough net, and even if you only get 1% response, it's pretty lucrative.
But it's actually quite difficult to really get all of this through someone's head.
Meh. You don't understand the economics of the outright bloatware. And the true value add stuff is the OEM differentiator stuff -- not preinstalling that stuff would be a counter productive as Apple not installing Mail.app.
Except I've never seen any of this "OEM differentiator" software which wasn't complete shit.
I don't need a Toshiba wizard to tell me there are Windows Updates to apply. I don't need an HP wizard to tell me that it can optimize my display resolution for me.
I can't tell you how often someone I know who has bought one of these OEM bloatware boxes who hasn't subsequently found themselves the proud owner of a machine which is slow, useless, and annoying to use. My wife tried to use the feature on her HP laptop to make the recovery disk -- it failed, and then decided that since it had been ran once, it could never be ran again
I really find it hard to believe that extra junk they install actually makes anything better for anybody. In fact, my guess is that it actually generates ill-will instead of making a better product. Because I can tell you with great certainty that my wife and mother in law have gotten pissed at HP and Toshiba on their own, and asked me to take a look because their new computer was dog slow and unresponsive.
So, tell me again, how does this crap actually benefit them again? It doesn't seem to benefit the consumer. In fact, it seems to do more harm than good. If my mother in law (who isn't exactly a computer savvy person) can say to me "what is this Toshiba crap and why is it here?", I find it hard to believe anybody else is going "wow, this is awesome".
There's something to be said for a butt ugly machine that can be upgraded.
My problem with Compaq has been that for a lot of years they used completely non-standard parts to be sure you had to buy from them. And their installs were usually trying to be "clever" with one of those restore partitions and not giving you actual install media.
Granted, it's not a wide sample, but what I did see of them years ago made them into a company that went into the "nope" category by default.
Glad you've had good results, but they're not a company I'd have dealt with for over a decade now. (I'm not even sure if anything gets sold under that brand any more.)
There were quite a few mergers/acquisitions from the.com era that, in retrospect, mostly just served to suck all of the value out of companies. Like when AOL bought Time Warner using the monopoly money that was their stock at the time.
Slashdot Mirror
But, that's the problem.
In the real world, banks are regulated, covered under some oversight, and insured.
If this parallel banking system doesn't have any of these controls, then there's simply no way you can trust the system as a whole.
So, me, I'll stick to having my money backed by real banks, with an actual transaction processing backed by major players, and which all of the players understand the risks and their own liability.
Trusting the internet with my money is like trusting a crackhead to guard my house. What you're describing is that any idiot can come along and try to get into the game. No thanks.
This may not be a specific issue with the currency, but the entire "banking" ecosystem around it sounds like something I'd fundamentally have zero trust in.
But, that's kind of the core of the problem.
In the real world, the banking and trading system is monitored by people with the power to enforce, have long histories and memories of what can go wrong, and is generally policed by governments cooperating.
But the internet equivalent makes it sound like a bunch of shady, back alley people doing financial transactions outside of the normal system.
So for me, there's simply no basis to trust "Bob's online brokerage and clearing house for virtual currency", or the entire BitCoin system.
Much like PayPal isn't a bank, but does many bank-like things -- it isn't regulated like a bank, and doesn't offer you the same legal protections. It's hard not to see this as more of the same -- but since the currency still has real world value, people will treat it as such. The tendency to lie, cheat and steal doesn't go away because it's virtual currency.
LOL, like I said, "Bob's online brokerage" ... why should I trust them? They're completely unregulated, outside of the normal banking system, and not really accountable to anybody. What could possibly go wrong?
I view this as being pretty close to walking up to someone running a lemon-aid stand who claims to be a bank, and depositing a bunch of money. When the guy with the lemon-aid stand proves to have little or no security, or is completely dishonest ... well, good luck getting your money back.
I'm not really surprised by this. Someone had the idea to create a purely virtual currency, and someone else has found it to be an attractive target.
The fact that it is vulnerable to this kind of attack probably indicates there's some real flaws in how this currency is supposed to work -- or at least a few places where someone can get through the cracks.
I remember when I first started hearing about this, and thinking "gee, I hope they've thought through all of the security issues". It's like security in operating systems ... there's tons of things you could overlook which can let someone in, and until it starts happening, you likely haven't even thought of all of them.
I feel bad for anybody has lost their money on this, but I've been treating this like an experiment which has the potential to go really wrong. It's just so massively complex to try to design your own currency system that someone isn't going to try to exploit without going through a lot of growing pains.
Do they need such permission?
Serious question: does the fact that someone owns the movie rights to these films preclude someone from doing an artistic work which is inspired from the books as long as they're not using someone else's copyrighted material or using their designs?
There is a truly huge amount of artwork inspired by Tolkien's books, much of which was drawn on for inspiration for the movies.
Much like Disney can't stop you from making stories based on the same stories as they did (providing it isn't using their images and the like), I am puzzled they could even possibly have the right to say "You can't make something set in Middle Earth, we own all of it".
This sounds like a gross abuse. Unless they actually used images from the films or made it look too much like the films ... the sheer amount of artwork imagining Middle Earth was already vast when I played D&D in the 80s.
There's no way Warner Bros has the rights to all artistic works related to that. They may have the film rights, but I seriously doubt that precludes anybody from trying to do artwork featuring Gandalf and Elves and the like.
Hell, the actual map was in the books ... it's not like it's a secret, and it's not like they created it. All this IP crap is getting ridiculous.
Obviously they can't afford to fight this. Sad there doesn't seem to be a link to the actual C&D letter (at least that I can see) ... I'd be curious to see what they're claiming. I'd be willing to bet they're on some shaky footing with whatever assertions they've made.
Given Microsoft's long and storied history of writing software for platforms that aren't theirs .. they may do that on their own.
Other than Office for the Mac, which last I heard is largely neglected and not well maintained, I'm not sure I can think of a single application Microsoft ever wrote from scratch with the intent of supporting operating systems other than their own. And definitely not multiple platforms with the same thing.
I'm sure there are examples I just don't know of, but Microsoft hasn't traditionally made a practice of writing code for other environments. I'm sure they have the resources for it, but they don't really have a history of doing it.
I fear in the end they might end up just buying someone who has already taken a stab at it and getting them to retool to their protocols. But, hey, they might surprise us and do something really cool.
But there might be a large percentage of people with Apple devices who ask themselves "why on Earth would I want this from Microsoft?". In which case, this might be doomed to indifference.
The problem with trying to create something like this, is I'm not sure that Silicon Valley was 'created' per se.
It seems like it happened because you had a couple of companies (HP for example) who set up shop there, and then other stuff grew around it. I'm not sure you could just go out and say "OK, we'll put a center of innovation and technology here".
It sort of has to grow organically I should think.
I used to work with someone who grew up in what is now Silicon Valley. He said at the time, it was a very not fancy suburb of San Francisco, but that over the years it changed into what it is now, with the crazy real estate prices and everything else to go with it.
It just seems like more of a historical accident than something you can plan for. Sure, you can try to entice people to go there, and possibly even give some perks for doing it. But that doesn't seem like it is going to give you all that much chance of success.
Cities occasionally decide they want to become hubs of this kind of stuff, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're going to achieve this.
Dude, SCOTUS upheld that you can patent genes. You know, the ones people already have.
I wish what you said were true, but I'm not sure it is any more. :(
I have tried very hard to make sure the things I buy that need charging will mostly charge off of USB of some sort.
I've got a really nice Kensington charger with 4 USB ports that covers most of what I need.
My two cameras each have a dedicated charger, but the rest of my electronic devices can get handled with that. It really does cut down on the number of chargers you need to keep around. It also makes travel easier since it will handle any currents in use (110/220V, 50/60Hz), and I only need to bring it, and the appropriate cables.
Well, I for one welcome our new cyborg-baby overlords.
I think the theory goes that by the time you're retiring a product (unless it was a complete flop), you're likely to have recouped the start-up and development costs, and then the cost of units after a certain point get cheaper per unit and you flip over into the black.
If the product was successful, you recoup your costs from the first units, and then start becoming profitable. Over time, by the time you're well into production, the unit cost of each item drops (because you account for your costs first).
Of course, if you lose money from the start, never sell enough units to recoup your costs ... well, then you have a net loss.
Nothing radical is being proposed here unless Amazon really shot themselves in the foot.
Or gain market share.
In the case of a Kindle, the expectation is you'll be buying eBooks from Amazon.
The reality is, selling it at a loss is better than having unsold inventory you'll never sell anyway. So you might as well sell at a discount and recoup *some* of your costs, or you just end up with junk and recover none of your costs.
Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.
History has surprisingly few benevolent dictators, unfortunately.
In all honesty, my first thought was of William Gibson's Neuromancer and Razorgirl.
Well, I'd certainly believe that vmware has gotten a lot right. I haven't worked in a place that doesn't have a large vmware infrastructure in quite some time.
Well, the ones I worked on had been written in the 60s. Yes, we were trying to give them modern GUIs and the like, but the longer we worked with it, the more we kept coming back to things that they swore up front would never ever happen, and that happened all over the place. So even just trying to get all of the little undocumented bits and corner cases was proving to be an impossible task. The software was also used for keeping track of some very large and complicated bits of machinery (all I can really say about that), some of which literally had 40 years worth of data associated with them, some newer. None of the assumptions they told us to build the system on proved to be true as we got deeper, which made attempts to adjust our system impossible (we had built lots of stuff to preclude what was subsequently shown to be normal data).
I will have to take you at your word for that. The people I've known who still have contact with mainframes are quite insistent that you could never get anywhere close to the performance of a mainframe with a couple of x86 boxes. Maybe for some apps, but certainly not across the spectrum of what they use them for.
It just seems implausible to me that people would still be buying these things if they could replace it that easily ... it actually boggles the mind to think that. Otherwise everyone would have done that by now.
These are actual enterprise apps like you'd see in a fortune 500? Or departmental solutions? Like I said, the last thing I'd expect is that you can truly replace those beasties with a couple of PCs -- if for nothing else, the reliability and uptime you can get.
The only industries I've ever been involved in that use them treat the 7-figure maintenance on them to be cost of doing business, because they have more zeroes in their daily stuff. Hell, the machines alone cost 9-figures, and over their lifetime affected at least one or two more digits.
I'm quite sure that for the applications people actually use mainframes for, you're utterly wrong.
Not only do they scale massively higher in terms of throughput, they also manage to do it with obscene uptimes (measured in years) and reliability nothing can compare to.
For certain kinds of applications, what you say is largely true. But at the huge end for things like banking, financial transactions, and airline reservations ... there's really no comparison.
I've worked on projects trying to do exactly this. And I've seen a couple of them fail.
Trying to map out all of the use cases for software which is mission critical and has been around since the 60's can actually prove to be exceedingly challenging if not impossible.
I'm just not convinced that for the kinds of applications and environments where people will run mainframes that what you suggest would give the same performance or scalability as a big giant mainframe. There just seems to be something missing from that picture, and to me it's the sheer volume of stuff these things handle. Certainly not even in the same category as what you call a midrange desktop.
It may not be just you. But I think a lot of people really have no idea of just how many mainframes are still chugging away doing what they've always done.
My wife does outsourced SAN storage, and they still have a couple of clients with big iron running.
Every couple of years when everybody has forgotten about the machines, an IBM tech will call up and say that the machine has phoned home and has a part that needs to be swapped out and that he needs to go onsite. Which usually leads to several hours of people trying to remember what it is and where it is (except the guys who work in the data center, who can't miss it).
I've worked in several places that have had mainframes for literally decades. And I've even worked on a project or two which tried to replace ancient, purpose built software with some shiny new stuff. In the cases I've seen, after spending a few years a a few million dollars ... they still can't replace the mainframe and scrap the project.
I knew someone in the early 2000's who had retired from his job with a full pension, and was back as a consultant making at least 3x his old salary because they no longer could find someone who knew the machines and the software like he did.
Mainframes haven't gone away. Not by any stretch. And I bet this one still runs the stuff from the IBM 360 days quite nicely.
I think it depends on how well you can manage with your left hand.
My brother is a lefty, and in school he was practically forced to try to learn to write with his left hand until they got over it. He's fairly dextrous with both hands, and actually golfs like a righty.
But I know my DSLR camera and several electronic gadgets is set up nicely for a right handed person, and would likely be a pain for a lefty.
In my case, my left hand has never had much fine dexterity. So if I was suddenly forced to do things left handed, I'd be screwed. And if you gave me an SLR with the controls and shutter button on the left, well, I likely couldn't use it.
I think lefties have just had to adapt more, and I assume that not as many of them have a right hand which is as useless as my left. There's nothing wrong with my left hand, but really fine motor skills isn't something I've ever been able to make it do; it's just not there.
I can definitely see how a lefty confronted with a can opener or something might be in for some nuisance if they can't do as much with their right hand.
You have to work at it (and that implies being willing to), and I would agree that for every single task it might be a bit much.
But, many years ago I worked with a team of other coders, and we worked together for quite a few years. We developed our own style where mostly people were heads down, but if you ran into a problem or a question, you just called out the name of the guy next to you and then scrummed. We'd sometimes pair code for specific things, often discuss what we were doing, do frequent code reviews and walk-throughs, and go to a whiteboard at the drop of a hat. Overall it created a good balance between getting out the main body of it, and making sure we understood all of the fiddly bits.
Fast forward, and I don't write code so much any more. But on a project I was working on last year (a giant software upgrade with loads of machines, components, databases) we really needed to be sure it was Done Right Every Time. So, we basically adapted pair programming, and set it up so we had a plan, a checklist, and two people. someone was always verifying what was being done, and prompting for the next things. Admittedly, this started with two people who had been doing this kind of stuff for years and worked well together, but we brought in and trained up some new resources using the same thing.
As we went on and I explained to people why I insisted on doing it that way, we ramped up the team so we could have two 8 hour shifts (we only had a 3 day weekend to do the actual go-live). By the time we were ready to do the final upgrade of the production environment, we did it smoothly, and actually in about only 80% of the projected time. The PMs were really pleased, and management was ecstatic.
You're absolutely correct that it won't fix every problem you have, and doesn't help in every situation ... but it's just another thing in the list of how you can go about getting things done right, accurately, and with some certainty that it's been given as much neurons as it could.
It's never a bad thing to know your options. I've had positive results in both writing code and system deployments. But I've also seen it done horribly bad, which didn't really improve anything, and in some cases, seems to have made it worse.
In my experience, coders who like to do clever tricky things don't do well in this situation. But, in my experience those guys can also be a liability in writing code as they just want to bode up something which isn't maintainable, which which they think is 'cool'.
Me, I find there's an awful lot of situations in which a second set of eyes (and another whole brain) can really improve outcomes.
You seem to be laboring under the impression that teh Sphere of Stink of a fart is limited to mere inches.
Trust me, if you're within a 12-15 foot radius of me, you're gonna get it. :-P
Good luck with that.
Many of us who have parents are are getting a little older have to deal with this kind of stuff. They're often not very computer savvy, and don't have the natural paranoia many of us have developed.
But they're going to want to maybe run tax software, the software for their camera, maybe run Office, maybe sync their eBook and a few other things. They're not going to be interested in running Linux, because the first thing they try to install that doesn't work they're going to be pissed off. I wouldn't foist Linux on my parents, and having seen the software they use, Linux wouldn't really be suitable for them. Because they do just enough as to make Linux more trouble than it's worth because there are things they need to do you can't do on Linux at all, and other things for which there is a piece of software which does most of what you want, but not al of it.
When my parents got their PC a couple of years ago, I sat them down and explained to them how you shouldn't always trust the internet, you definitely shouldn't trust someone calling you out of the blue claiming to be ... well, anybody really unless you can confirm it, and that I live sufficiently far enough away that being their tech support isn't practical. So they really needed to take to heart the risks.
Once I'd impressed upon them just how serious I was and what could go wrong, they then went forth with an understanding that they need to keep their wits about them. They've learned to be wary of unsolicited calls, and never to discuss any of that stuff unless they initiated the conversation with a number they verified from an official location.
Have you met any older people? I'm talking anywhere between 60 and 90. Many of them simply never developed the kind of watchfulness we have, and impressing upon them how important it is.
My great aunt in her late 90's fell for a couple of scams here and there (chump change, really). The problem was that somehow they figured out that if they could imply they were from her church then she'd be likely to open her wallet to them.
It's, for lack of a better word, that they're not sophisticated/worldly/cynical enough about people. Given how often I get calls from people claiming to be all sorts of things, I can completely see how someone who is in their 70's just don't realize to not trust someone by default. If you grew up in a rural area, or grew up before TV ... that level of distrust is just not natural to you.
Even a lot of the media targeted towards seniors try to give good coverage of the issues here. But you'd be surprised at how many older people really don't know what we consider to be fairly basic stuff.
Hell, I've gotten to the point that if I don't immediately recognize the phone number, I simply don't answer since most of my incoming calls are fraudulent. It's just like spam, cast a wide enough net, and even if you only get 1% response, it's pretty lucrative.
But it's actually quite difficult to really get all of this through someone's head.
Hmmm, thanks for the link ... but buying a Dell or an Asus from Microsoft seems kind of broken to me.
I hope they don't buy it from the OEMs, remove all of the crap, and then sell it to you.
I'm betting you're paying an absurd premium for what a local system-builder could probably put together for you.
Except I've never seen any of this "OEM differentiator" software which wasn't complete shit.
I don't need a Toshiba wizard to tell me there are Windows Updates to apply. I don't need an HP wizard to tell me that it can optimize my display resolution for me.
I can't tell you how often someone I know who has bought one of these OEM bloatware boxes who hasn't subsequently found themselves the proud owner of a machine which is slow, useless, and annoying to use. My wife tried to use the feature on her HP laptop to make the recovery disk -- it failed, and then decided that since it had been ran once, it could never be ran again
I really find it hard to believe that extra junk they install actually makes anything better for anybody. In fact, my guess is that it actually generates ill-will instead of making a better product. Because I can tell you with great certainty that my wife and mother in law have gotten pissed at HP and Toshiba on their own, and asked me to take a look because their new computer was dog slow and unresponsive.
So, tell me again, how does this crap actually benefit them again? It doesn't seem to benefit the consumer. In fact, it seems to do more harm than good. If my mother in law (who isn't exactly a computer savvy person) can say to me "what is this Toshiba crap and why is it here?", I find it hard to believe anybody else is going "wow, this is awesome".
My problem with Compaq has been that for a lot of years they used completely non-standard parts to be sure you had to buy from them. And their installs were usually trying to be "clever" with one of those restore partitions and not giving you actual install media.
Granted, it's not a wide sample, but what I did see of them years ago made them into a company that went into the "nope" category by default.
Glad you've had good results, but they're not a company I'd have dealt with for over a decade now. (I'm not even sure if anything gets sold under that brand any more.)
After having dragged DEC down with them.
There were quite a few mergers/acquisitions from the .com era that, in retrospect, mostly just served to suck all of the value out of companies. Like when AOL bought Time Warner using the monopoly money that was their stock at the time.