I think people are mistakenly equating being on the latest release with being "up to date".
As long as the version you are on is still getting security updates you are on the latest version of your release line. This is all we need, and what we need to push vendors to support. If your hardware is good enough to support the latest release, you should be pushing your vendor for an update, but it's not wholly necessary.
I'm saying that the "rarely" is the problem. Until that is solved you have to:
a) Own a separate car that is rarely used just to go out for those rare events. b) Rent a car to go out into the boonies. This may or may not be feasible to do on a whim. c) Don't go.
"a" is a huge financial hurdle. "b" has limitations on spontaneity. "c" represents a freedom I'm not wiling to give up.
Everyone that keeps saying that the autonomous cars are just around the corner all live in big cities. To get to the point they work without a steering wheel (aka manual mode) these companies have to solve for rural driving. Until the cars can reliably drive up a back woods, rocky, single lane mountain road they are worthless.
Think of going camping. Are you going to be able to take your family camping in your autonomous minivan? What about going for a tour of scenic back roads in Montana, Alaska, Wyoming, the Dakotas.
Last, how are these cars going to navigate through a rural dirt road with 2 feet of fresh snow on it.
These are all problems the people in the big cities are going to have to live with. They may only live with it a very very small percentage of the time, but it's a major hurdle to overcome.
Two nics would allow for many network related functions to be performed by the RaspberryPI. Currently the single nic is quite limiting if you have ~30+ MBit of bandwidth to your home.
Based on my experience at a fortune 100 company with a heavy interest in Java. Don't use Java. Use PHP or LUA as a cgi. Your sysadmins who have to keep your application up will thank you.
Do not use java. To make it work rigth you have to go against everything the community says you should do.
Do not use NFS
For file storage use something like MogileFS. It is not likely the best, but it's a proper example of what you will want
If you use a database you MUST understand and use the relational aspects of things. If you use the database as just a key:value store I will personally beat the ever living shit out of you.
Use loose coupling and sharding of your data. Multiple databases on multiple replicated servers is happy. Isolate each aspect of your product into separate databases.
On a related note it's likely that only accounts need to be replicated between databases. It's not hard and will allow you to scale very large
If you use memcached do not store individual bits of data. Store complete rendered data only
Use cgi. Mod_* and Java are a bitch to debug. Php and lua work well for this. If you have something that is multi-tenant multi-version this applies even more.
Do not use web session affinity.
Do not use full text search in a database
Do not use stored procedures
Do not use large frameworks. If you must use a framework use small ones dedicated to a small subset of functionality. No framework you use should use a database.
Our interviews for sysadmins always ask what editor people use on their Linux boxes. People always think it's a funny joke due to the vi/emacs war, but it is actually a serious question and there is only two wrong answers: nano and pico. If you answer nano or pico you will not get hired.
It actually shows that you do not know the system as well as you are claiming. nano/pico will silently corrupt files on you.
Try it for yourself. Create a file with long lines in vi/emacs. Have a bunch of words on the long line. Now open that file in pico/nano and put a single space at the beginning of the long line and save the file.
If you go in with emacs/vi you will now notice an extra carriage return that you did not put in. If I ever catch a sysadmin using nano on a system file it is cause for termination.
Except for varmint shooters (I'm one). That's all for the kill. Gophers/Prairie dogs exploding in a ball of red mist is just amazing.
They make really heavy guns shooting small caliber bullets out of medium cartidges (.204 Ruger/.17 Fireball) for two things: Target (read paper) and Varmint (dead sploded things). The heavy guns let you see the target in scope as it blows up. Without the combination of lighter cartridge and heavy gun the recoil would not allow you to see the action.
The design of the varmint bullets is such that you have a bullet spinning at a couple hundred thousand RPMs that is highly frangible. This is what makes the things go *poof*. There is far more varmint type bullets from commercial manufacturers than there are target bullets in these calibers. That's what people want, and for good reason: it's fun.
Down south some of these critters actually get big enough to be a source of food. Where I live (up north) that's not the case. They are tiny little critters that just annoy ranchers and farmers. The annoyance is in the form of broken legs on cows/horses and crop damage. My fun actually helps things, but I do it for the fun, not out of helping a fellow human down the road.
A 7"/10" tablet or a 4" phone screen will NEVER replace a gaming console. There are many many factors that make this an insane and retarded statement.
1) Game controller. Yes the kinect is interesting. Yes gyros can provide an intersting experience as well. But can you do a 16 hour gaming session waving your arms around like that (both kinect style or wii style with a large tablet). The standard game controller is a perfect interface for most games, and an OK stand in for others (FPS games should be with a mouse).
2) As mentioned above: Screen size.
3) Social gaming (in close physical proximity). A big screen is ideal for this. Tablets (or worse phones) are just too small to share.
4) Touch screens suck for the vast majority of stuff. Motion control is just behind it in usability. With touch screens a large number of games are not playable because your hand is blocking critical space on the screen.
There are more.. but there's beer in the NOC and I'm thirsty.
Assuming I'm doing the math correctly 1050 MPH is only 1540 feet per second. That's half again as fast as a typical.22. The current crop of "speeding bullets" is pushing around 4200 f/s.
That's only about 1/6 the way through the speed range of a typical bullet. I'd say when you get to 5/6 of the higher end you can begin calling it "speeding".
When I buy a game I want to be able to play it as long as I have the ability to do so (as long as my hardware/emulator still works). If any corporation decides it's no longer profitable to keep up the "cloud storage" for my particular game, am I then no longer able to play?
You do get extra security by diversification, because you have the ability to continue to function while one OS's computers are struggling with a malware attack.
You are confusing fault tolerance with security. The parent is correct that in staying with one platform you are more *secure*, however you will not be able to handle faults as easily.
You seem to believe that adding diversification at the OS level is akin to adding security in depth. In the case that is presented in the parent, the data is what we are trying to protect. The data is at the same level in the security depth model for this comparison. Adding more attack vectors to get at the data reduces the security surrounding the data.
There are only two "companies" that need to mandate ODF. The US Federal Government and Wal*Mart. If someone could find a way to convince those two entities to convert, corporate America and eventually the rest of the world would convert also. It's basically a game of follow the money, and depending on your market those two are where the money is at.
Ok so the clock speed rocks. But does the rest of the system keep up? The big advantage I see with AMD is Hyper Transport and the newly ratified Hyper Transport 3.0. You can have a THz CPU but if you can't feed it data/instructions it's just going to waste most of it's potential.
I'm not familiar with any possible new bus technology coming out with the new Intel CPU's, but based on my current experience with the latest Dell boxes (Intel) and our new Penguin Computing and HP AMD boxes Intel has a lot of catchup to do to outperform AMD and their whole architecture.
We are using these boxes as MySQL database servers with each server containing 100+ 500 MB to 50 GB databases attached to fiber channel disk arrays. These boxes are mostly doing I/O, but a fair amount of CPU is used for sorting/math done at the database level. The AMD boxes smoke the Intel ones.
Unless Intel also releases a whole new architecture that can compete with Hyper Transport the extra speed will most likely be wasted.
What you are saying is the same thing that happened to the web. IE "fixes" a lot of errors in HTML and the programmers thought that because the renedered page was "correct" their code was good. Like it or not Netscape 4.x did one thing well, it told you if your table structures were correct because it didn't try to work around the bad code.
You suggestion of having the compiler fix the problem instead of the programmer becomming better is going down the same road. If I'm writing ANSI C code and want to port my program to multiple platforms all of the compilers on all platforms would have to support this "idiot programmer" feature.
I don't believe rewarding bad programming skills will benefit us long term. It is a people problem not a technological one. Don't throw technology at it, because in the long run it will make the people problem worse.
As an end user trying to get a job this is kinda useless, unless I really want a job with your company. If I am just searching for jobs and you are one of 30 companies in my area I'm not going to subscribe to 30 rss feeds to find a job.
Where this would be really useful is in job search portals that could aggrigate rss like feeds. You would have a standard naming scheme like "http://www.example.com/jobs.rss" (similiar to robots.txt) that search engines could hit looking for job postings.
Doing something like this would allow easy job listing access for your local chamber of commerce to aggrigate local job listings from local companies.
There's definatly possibilities, but I doubt that it's useful for end users unless you are a large corporation like IBM/Microsoft etc...
Because with a large enough user base there will be people that care enough and are capable of maintaining the product.
Also there would be considerable interest from Novell, RedHat, Sun, Linspire, IBM and hell even Apple to maintain this product. With the existing code base it'd be easier to port VB over to UNIX/Linux/OSX with bug/feature compatibility. You may laugh at this, but, think about it for a minute. There are basically two fundimental technologies that are holding people to windows in large corporate environments (where the $$$ is).
1) ActiveX and IE for "Mission Critical" applications. Think help desks and similiar support applications that corporations have paid big bucks for.
2) Small custom programs for the internal use of the company. There are a significant number of these written in VB.
While #1 isn't addressed by this possibility #2 is. The larger dent in the migration path you can make the less painful it is for companies to convert the desktop. The corporate Linux desktop is not too distant of a reality except for these custom apps, and a F/OSS (bug and feature compatible) VB would go a long way in easing the migration.
MacOS X, Windows, KDE and GNOME all support it. It looks just like any other file system to native file managers and your users can only see their files. Since it works over a web server connection (it's just an extension of the http protocol) it's as secure as your web server is.
It's important to realize that the government and government workers have more important things to do and to be working on than dealing with computer problems. Now, Linux doesn't have all that many problems if set up correctly and everything else. The unfortunate part is that most folks who work in government aren't going to want to have to learn Linux. That's just my guess, after all. I could be wrong.
I'd say that you are wrong. Nobody has to "learn linux". This is what you have systems administrators for. Joe average office worker only needs to know how to use a few office programs. If they are not capable of making the transition from MS Office to OpenOffice.org because X option is not available under Y menu then they should not work for your organization.
The ability to think should be part of the job requirements, and the transition from a MS desktop to any other desktop (X and MacOS) should take any user only 4 hours to get situated before being productive again.
The only problems that I can think of when migrating platforms is the custom applications that have been written for your organization. In these cases you should take a look at re-developing these applications in a cross platform manor. A strong candidate for small mindless aplications (which most are) that do not fit the web model efficiently is using XUL. It's cross platform and as long as your platform supports Mozilla/Fire(name of the week) you should be fine.
If XUL doesn't do it for you then try python with wxwidgets (I think that's what it is now). This is cross platform also and has more capabilities than XUL.
Finally if that doesn't cut it for you you can always use java/mono/.NET as long as you don't try using platform specific extensions.
Using these types of guidelines should make migrating desktops a non event for the most part. Just a couple of hours for a person to get situated with their new environment and your off being productive again.
Yes you may have spent a couple of hours working out how to configure bind. My question for you is did you actually understand what it was you were doing after you got bind configured?
Compare that with a couple of text boxes with labels on them that let you set a hostname and an IP address. Click "OK" and you are done. If you had taken this route first would you have known exactly what you did? Do you understand what impact the setting you have set can have on other clients?
I have set up bind 4, 8, and 9 on a number of occasions. I still have to refer to the documentation when setting something up from scratch. But, I really do understand most of the config settings and can tell you what affect they are supposed to have on clients. Do you have this knowlege when setting up your windows DNS server?
Disclamer: I have never set up a DNS server under windows. But, if the setup is anything like the rest of windows configuration the above point I am trying to make is quite valid.
And finally if you didn't get the point: You should not set up any computer service unless you know full well what you are doing. Windows (in my experience) lets you just eek by enough to get something working and all of a sudden you think you are a guru.
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I think people are mistakenly equating being on the latest release with being "up to date".
As long as the version you are on is still getting security updates you are on the latest version of your release line. This is all we need, and what we need to push vendors to support. If your hardware is good enough to support the latest release, you should be pushing your vendor for an update, but it's not wholly necessary.
Mentioning the age does nothing for the story. It's completely irrelevant data.
I am sanity.
I'm saying that the "rarely" is the problem. Until that is solved you have to:
a) Own a separate car that is rarely used just to go out for those rare events.
b) Rent a car to go out into the boonies. This may or may not be feasible to do on a whim.
c) Don't go.
"a" is a huge financial hurdle. "b" has limitations on spontaneity. "c" represents a freedom I'm not wiling to give up.
Everyone that keeps saying that the autonomous cars are just around the corner all live in big cities. To get to the point they work without a steering wheel (aka manual mode) these companies have to solve for rural driving. Until the cars can reliably drive up a back woods, rocky, single lane mountain road they are worthless.
Think of going camping. Are you going to be able to take your family camping in your autonomous minivan? What about going for a tour of scenic back roads in Montana, Alaska, Wyoming, the Dakotas.
Last, how are these cars going to navigate through a rural dirt road with 2 feet of fresh snow on it.
These are all problems the people in the big cities are going to have to live with. They may only live with it a very very small percentage of the time, but it's a major hurdle to overcome.
You are so close replace the computer with a magnet and you got yourself a list
Two nics would allow for many network related functions to be performed by the RaspberryPI. Currently the single nic is quite limiting if you have ~30+ MBit of bandwidth to your home.
Based on my experience at a fortune 100 company with a heavy interest in Java. Don't use Java. Use PHP or LUA as a cgi. Your sysadmins who have to keep your application up will thank you.
Our interviews for sysadmins always ask what editor people use on their Linux boxes. People always think it's a funny joke due to the vi/emacs war, but it is actually a serious question and there is only two wrong answers: nano and pico. If you answer nano or pico you will not get hired.
It actually shows that you do not know the system as well as you are claiming. nano/pico will silently corrupt files on you.
Try it for yourself. Create a file with long lines in vi/emacs. Have a bunch of words on the long line. Now open that file in pico/nano and put a single space at the beginning of the long line and save the file.
If you go in with emacs/vi you will now notice an extra carriage return that you did not put in. If I ever catch a sysadmin using nano on a system file it is cause for termination.
Except for varmint shooters (I'm one). That's all for the kill. Gophers/Prairie dogs exploding in a ball of red mist is just amazing.
They make really heavy guns shooting small caliber bullets out of medium cartidges (.204 Ruger/.17 Fireball) for two things: Target (read paper) and Varmint (dead sploded things). The heavy guns let you see the target in scope as it blows up. Without the combination of lighter cartridge and heavy gun the recoil would not allow you to see the action.
The design of the varmint bullets is such that you have a bullet spinning at a couple hundred thousand RPMs that is highly frangible. This is what makes the things go *poof*. There is far more varmint type bullets from commercial manufacturers than there are target bullets in these calibers. That's what people want, and for good reason: it's fun.
Down south some of these critters actually get big enough to be a source of food. Where I live (up north) that's not the case. They are tiny little critters that just annoy ranchers and farmers. The annoyance is in the form of broken legs on cows/horses and crop damage. My fun actually helps things, but I do it for the fun, not out of helping a fellow human down the road.
A 7"/10" tablet or a 4" phone screen will NEVER replace a gaming console. There are many many factors that make this an insane and retarded statement.
1) Game controller. Yes the kinect is interesting. Yes gyros can provide an intersting experience as well. But can you do a 16 hour gaming session waving your arms around like that (both kinect style or wii style with a large tablet). The standard game controller is a perfect interface for most games, and an OK stand in for others (FPS games should be with a mouse).
2) As mentioned above: Screen size.
3) Social gaming (in close physical proximity). A big screen is ideal for this. Tablets (or worse phones) are just too small to share.
4) Touch screens suck for the vast majority of stuff. Motion control is just behind it in usability. With touch screens a large number of games are not playable because your hand is blocking critical space on the screen.
There are more.. but there's beer in the NOC and I'm thirsty.
Assuming I'm doing the math correctly 1050 MPH is only 1540 feet per second. That's half again as fast as a typical .22. The current crop of "speeding bullets" is pushing around 4200 f/s.
That's only about 1/6 the way through the speed range of a typical bullet. I'd say when you get to 5/6 of the higher end you can begin calling it "speeding".
When I buy a game I want to be able to play it as long as I have the ability to do so (as long as my hardware/emulator still works). If any corporation decides it's no longer profitable to keep up the "cloud storage" for my particular game, am I then no longer able to play?
You do get extra security by diversification, because you have the ability to continue to function while one OS's computers are struggling with a malware attack.
You are confusing fault tolerance with security. The parent is correct that in staying with one platform you are more *secure*, however you will not be able to handle faults as easily.
You seem to believe that adding diversification at the OS level is akin to adding security in depth. In the case that is presented in the parent, the data is what we are trying to protect. The data is at the same level in the security depth model for this comparison. Adding more attack vectors to get at the data reduces the security surrounding the data.
Have we stopped bashing ME yet? I think both Vista and ME are cut from the same cloth with regard to their "quality".
There are only two "companies" that need to mandate ODF. The US Federal Government and Wal*Mart. If someone could find a way to convince those two entities to convert, corporate America and eventually the rest of the world would convert also. It's basically a game of follow the money, and depending on your market those two are where the money is at.
Because the director uses the same password in multiple systems.
Ok so the clock speed rocks. But does the rest of the system keep up? The big advantage I see with AMD is Hyper Transport and the newly ratified Hyper Transport 3.0. You can have a THz CPU but if you can't feed it data/instructions it's just going to waste most of it's potential.
I'm not familiar with any possible new bus technology coming out with the new Intel CPU's, but based on my current experience with the latest Dell boxes (Intel) and our new Penguin Computing and HP AMD boxes Intel has a lot of catchup to do to outperform AMD and their whole architecture.
We are using these boxes as MySQL database servers with each server containing 100+ 500 MB to 50 GB databases attached to fiber channel disk arrays. These boxes are mostly doing I/O, but a fair amount of CPU is used for sorting/math done at the database level. The AMD boxes smoke the Intel ones.
Unless Intel also releases a whole new architecture that can compete with Hyper Transport the extra speed will most likely be wasted.
Bull.
What you are saying is the same thing that happened to the web. IE "fixes" a lot of errors in HTML and the programmers thought that because the renedered page was "correct" their code was good. Like it or not Netscape 4.x did one thing well, it told you if your table structures were correct because it didn't try to work around the bad code.
You suggestion of having the compiler fix the problem instead of the programmer becomming better is going down the same road. If I'm writing ANSI C code and want to port my program to multiple platforms all of the compilers on all platforms would have to support this "idiot programmer" feature.
I don't believe rewarding bad programming skills will benefit us long term. It is a people problem not a technological one. Don't throw technology at it, because in the long run it will make the people problem worse.
As an end user trying to get a job this is kinda useless, unless I really want a job with your company. If I am just searching for jobs and you are one of 30 companies in my area I'm not going to subscribe to 30 rss feeds to find a job.
Where this would be really useful is in job search portals that could aggrigate rss like feeds. You would have a standard naming scheme like "http://www.example.com/jobs.rss" (similiar to robots.txt) that search engines could hit looking for job postings.
Doing something like this would allow easy job listing access for your local chamber of commerce to aggrigate local job listings from local companies.
There's definatly possibilities, but I doubt that it's useful for end users unless you are a large corporation like IBM/Microsoft etc...
Because with a large enough user base there will be people that care enough and are capable of maintaining the product.
Also there would be considerable interest from Novell, RedHat, Sun, Linspire, IBM and hell even Apple to maintain this product. With the existing code base it'd be easier to port VB over to UNIX/Linux/OSX with bug/feature compatibility. You may laugh at this, but, think about it for a minute. There are basically two fundimental technologies that are holding people to windows in large corporate environments (where the $$$ is).
1) ActiveX and IE for "Mission Critical" applications. Think help desks and similiar support applications that corporations have paid big bucks for.
2) Small custom programs for the internal use of the company. There are a significant number of these written in VB.
While #1 isn't addressed by this possibility #2 is. The larger dent in the migration path you can make the less painful it is for companies to convert the desktop. The corporate Linux desktop is not too distant of a reality except for these custom apps, and a F/OSS (bug and feature compatible) VB would go a long way in easing the migration.
MacOS X, Windows, KDE and GNOME all support it. It looks just like any other file system to native file managers and your users can only see their files. Since it works over a web server connection (it's just an extension of the http protocol) it's as secure as your web server is.
http://www.webdav.org/
It's important to realize that the government and government workers have more important things to do and to be working on than dealing with computer problems. Now, Linux doesn't have all that many problems if set up correctly and everything else. The unfortunate part is that most folks who work in government aren't going to want to have to learn Linux. That's just my guess, after all. I could be wrong.
I'd say that you are wrong. Nobody has to "learn linux". This is what you have systems administrators for. Joe average office worker only needs to know how to use a few office programs. If they are not capable of making the transition from MS Office to OpenOffice.org because X option is not available under Y menu then they should not work for your organization. The ability to think should be part of the job requirements, and the transition from a MS desktop to any other desktop (X and MacOS) should take any user only 4 hours to get situated before being productive again.
The only problems that I can think of when migrating platforms is the custom applications that have been written for your organization. In these cases you should take a look at re-developing these applications in a cross platform manor. A strong candidate for small mindless aplications (which most are) that do not fit the web model efficiently is using XUL. It's cross platform and as long as your platform supports Mozilla/Fire(name of the week) you should be fine.
If XUL doesn't do it for you then try python with wxwidgets (I think that's what it is now). This is cross platform also and has more capabilities than XUL.
Finally if that doesn't cut it for you you can always use java/mono/.NET as long as you don't try using platform specific extensions.
Using these types of guidelines should make migrating desktops a non event for the most part. Just a couple of hours for a person to get situated with their new environment and your off being productive again.
Try adding -dpi 75 to you X startup.
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xdm/Xservers make it read: :0 local /usr/X11R6/bin/X -dpi 75
startx -- -dpi 75
or in
This is a good hack around hi res monitors and xft screwing with font sizes.
Yes you may have spent a couple of hours working out how to configure bind. My question for you is did you actually understand what it was you were doing after you got bind configured?
Compare that with a couple of text boxes with labels on them that let you set a hostname and an IP address. Click "OK" and you are done. If you had taken this route first would you have known exactly what you did? Do you understand what impact the setting you have set can have on other clients?
I have set up bind 4, 8, and 9 on a number of occasions. I still have to refer to the documentation when setting something up from scratch. But, I really do understand most of the config settings and can tell you what affect they are supposed to have on clients. Do you have this knowlege when setting up your windows DNS server?
Disclamer: I have never set up a DNS server under windows. But, if the setup is anything like the rest of windows configuration the above point I am trying to make is quite valid.
And finally if you didn't get the point: You should not set up any computer service unless you know full well what you are doing. Windows (in my experience) lets you just eek by enough to get something working and all of a sudden you think you are a guru.