Only the stupid ones. Either undersea or in the middle of a city, you're adding heat energy to the planet. The main question is whether you want to spend even more heat energy to relocate some of the excess to a more convenient location.
Put another way, "server electricity" is better than "server electricity plus air conditioning electricity".
Now, an easier sell might be to move data centers into less urban, possibly even rural settings. Think about it: no urban heat island to contend with. Usually more breeze to make that reduced cooling requirement even more efficient. Cheaper land to build on. It wouldn't be as effective as moving it underwater, but the logistics would be a lot easier to manage.
Let me give you a real-life example involving Microsoft, even if it's one that I've used a few times before. The company I work for built depends heavily on a FoxPro program with a 15 year history. Although it wouldn't have been my first choice, it's served us well over the years.
But now it's dead. There will never be a version based on.NET. There will never be a FoxPro 10. It may or may not run well on Vista (although they have a community-supported side project called "Sedna" that hopes to cobble something together). Now we're scrambling to port our mission-critical application - the one that keeps revenue flowing - to something more future-proof. The current version still runs great, but there's no assurance whatsoever that we'll be able to use it a couple of years from now. VB6 legacy apps are in the same boat, but we're lucky enough to only have to deal with one deprecated technology at a time.
So, yeah, my warning wasn't hypothetical. Redmond giveth and Redmond taketh away, and there's a very real risk that the components of your livelihood will simply disappear. Ours did. Fortunately, we (and from the sounds of it, you) are nimble enough to shift directions and move on with something new. We'll pull through this unscathed. That doesn't mean the transition will be pleasant, though, and there's a lot of other stuff we'd rather be spending our development dollars on.
That shouldn't have taken more than a few minutes:
"Access, I'd like you to meet my friend, Database. Database, this is Access. You two have nothing in common, but maybe you'll find something to talk about anyway.
I would never recommend OO.o to a business that was using hardware older than 1 to 2 years. It is just too damned slow.
I'm running Kubuntu 8.04 on a 4 year old Dell Dimension with a gig of RAM. I hadn't opened OO.o since my last reboot (from when I upgraded from 7.10), so none of it was already loaded.
On this older PC, the initial load of OO.o Writer took 5 seconds by my wristwatch. Subsequent loads took about 3 seconds. That should be fast enough for anyone, except maybe for people who compulsively close every application that they haven't used in the last 30 seconds.
Once loaded, it seems to sit and wait for me to type something about as quickly as any other program.
Many here just can't get past the idea that it's closed-source, a MSFT product, etc. Me? I just want to deliver the best software I can. We're a small company. Top Line growth is important. And I don't have the luxury of indulging personal preferences.
Same here, which is why we avoid Microsoft lock-in like the plague it is. Do you have the luxury of watching your hard work vaporize because the next version of Word drops some of the functions you use, and the current version won't run on Windows 7? Maybe you'll get lucky and neither of those will happen. A lot of us in IT aren't so lucky, though, and have watched the rug get pulled out from under us on key projects.
I'd been getting calls from "Card Services", representing themselves as being with my credit card company, once a day or so for a while. I whipped out a short blog entry one day just to vent, and somehow ended up with several thousands hits per month on it. Apparently I wasn't the only one they were driving crazy. It's good to see that these cretins are finally being reined in.
You don't get it, do you? The sin is not, in and of itself, in being a Republican. The sin is the hypocrisy. The Republicans present themselves as the law'n'order party.
Here's something that might surprise a lot of people: the current Republican leadership has a lot of us rank-and-file party members fit to be tied. Now, I'm certain that a lot of Republicans think Bush is the greatest thing since Napster v1, but the people I've personally spoke to think that he (and those like him) are nuts. We want freedom. We want smaller government - including reducing the military and corporate subsidies. We want the right to live our lives as free adults and do whatever makes us happy with other adults.
I don't know anything about Krvaric and his policies. Maybe he's a Bushist neocon. That's certainly possible. Still, there's a big possibility that he's as sick of the current fiasco as you and I are and truly wants something different. Don't assume that (R) automatically means "corporate overlord" because it doesn't. I understand how the higherups give that impression, but it's just not universally true.
Piracy is a lot more premeditated than drunk driving. If that politician organized fleets of drunk drivers, knowing it was generally held to be illegal, I'd imagine that you could consider them an expert on driving law. Especially if they never got convicted for having done it.
It's not that interesting that someone with an unconventional past rises up through political ranks. The real question for me is whether he retains any of those earlier values. Since he knows a whole lot more about copyright than most, what's his take on the DMCA etc.? Does his political record have much to say about it?
This book doesn't even have a printed copyright date on it. It basically says that the book is the property of the company (they sold casings and equipment for making sausages) and that you weren't allowed to keep it or use it if you weren't a current customer.
That doesn't seem so unreasonable. For example, my company's employee handbook doesn't have a copyright notice, and the business owns all copies of it.
So then we should cease to penalize anyone? This is what your logic dictates.
Yeah, you're right. Saying that it's dangerous to take away someone's option not to penalize you is exactly like saying you should never be penalized. I concede. Whatever.
If the judge has already ruled their claim to be fraudulent and is going to fine them, exactly through what mechanism is this supposed plaintiff going to have to go after you?
I'm talking about before the judge rules. Suppose that the plaintiffs realizes their mistake after the courts are involved but before the final judgment. In that event, unscrupulous plaintiffs may decide they're better off fighting tooth and nail to prevent being proven wrong rather than trying to back down and facing penalties.
I'm failing to see the problem with that scenario. Maybe next time the person won't be sending out fradulent DMCA requests anymore.
The problem is that it gives the plaintiffs a strong reason not to back down, even if they want to. Their choices become: 1) say "I'm sorry" and get fined by the judge, or 2) say "oh, crud" and throw in every legal resource at their disposal in the hope that you'll get scared (or go bankrupt) and give in.
I've read that when kidnapping became a capital crime, that the percentage of victims killed skyrocketed because the kidnappers perceived that their odds of escaping justice were better with a dead witness. If they were caught, they'd be executed anyway, so why not do everything possible to stack the deck? That may or may not be true, and there's a quantitative difference between kidnapping and a civil lawsuit, but I think the principle stands.
It's an outrageous situation that really shouldn't be defended.
Oh, I totally agree with that. It just seems to me that the alternative is the same situation with judges and lawyers thrown in for good measure. That's about the only way I can think of to make it even worse.
BTW, you really should give Xandros a chance. I figured I'd hate it, but I've been happily using it for a couple months. The only problem I had with it was the hassle of adding extra packages, like the major PITA of installing Kopete. It's otherwise been stable, lightweight, quick-booting, and generally pleasant to use. This from someone who always does the FreeBSD minimal install so that I can build the rest of the system the way I want it.
The reason this should go through court first is so there is an investigation as to whether or not the person is guilty of what is being said.
I'm pretty averse to involving the legal system unnecessarily. In this example, two private parties worked it out and moved on. Imagine the same scenario, except now the plaintiff faces penalties from a pissed-off judge if they admit they're wrong and want to drop their case. No, I think this worked exactly like it should.
I've been using the built-in Xandros distro for the last couple of months. It's OK, but I really miss the upgradeability and conveniently huge software repositories of Debian and Ubuntu. However, it seem like if I switch to one of those then I'd have to give up all the special features, like Fn+F2 to toggle the WiFi or Fn+F7 to mute the speakers. Are there any nice, modern distros that suppport all the functionality of the hacked-up Xandros that ships with it?
BTW, I know I can Google this. I'd just rather discuss it here.
I bet you can get every TYPE of application they need on one of those.
So it wont run MS office or possibly even open office. But do they need much more than a notepad with spellcheck?
I have an Eee PC for work. It has GCC, Python, Emacs, and the PostgreSQL client programs installed. You say "notepad with spellcheck". I say "tiny development system that lets me telecommute from my backyard on sunny days".
For me (and apparently millions of others), the Eee PC is the sweet spot for portable computing. It's small enough that I don't think twice about dragging it along wherever I'm going, and yet big enough that I'm not giving up anything. No "portable OS" will ever match the flexibility it offers.
Slashdot Mirror
Only the stupid ones. Either undersea or in the middle of a city, you're adding heat energy to the planet. The main question is whether you want to spend even more heat energy to relocate some of the excess to a more convenient location.
Put another way, "server electricity" is better than "server electricity plus air conditioning electricity".
Now, an easier sell might be to move data centers into less urban, possibly even rural settings. Think about it: no urban heat island to contend with. Usually more breeze to make that reduced cooling requirement even more efficient. Cheaper land to build on. It wouldn't be as effective as moving it underwater, but the logistics would be a lot easier to manage.
Then Microsoft has already won.
At least there you have the advantage of a computer you can slap a NIC in, and a standardized format for floppy disk images.
Let me give you a real-life example involving Microsoft, even if it's one that I've used a few times before. The company I work for built depends heavily on a FoxPro program with a 15 year history. Although it wouldn't have been my first choice, it's served us well over the years.
But now it's dead. There will never be a version based on .NET. There will never be a FoxPro 10. It may or may not run well on Vista (although they have a community-supported side project called "Sedna" that hopes to cobble something together). Now we're scrambling to port our mission-critical application - the one that keeps revenue flowing - to something more future-proof. The current version still runs great, but there's no assurance whatsoever that we'll be able to use it a couple of years from now. VB6 legacy apps are in the same boat, but we're lucky enough to only have to deal with one deprecated technology at a time.
So, yeah, my warning wasn't hypothetical. Redmond giveth and Redmond taketh away, and there's a very real risk that the components of your livelihood will simply disappear. Ours did. Fortunately, we (and from the sounds of it, you) are nimble enough to shift directions and move on with something new. We'll pull through this unscathed. That doesn't mean the transition will be pleasant, though, and there's a lot of other stuff we'd rather be spending our development dollars on.
That shouldn't have taken more than a few minutes:
"Access, I'd like you to meet my friend, Database. Database, this is Access. You two have nothing in common, but maybe you'll find something to talk about anyway.
I'm running Kubuntu 8.04 on a 4 year old Dell Dimension with a gig of RAM. I hadn't opened OO.o since my last reboot (from when I upgraded from 7.10), so none of it was already loaded.
On this older PC, the initial load of OO.o Writer took 5 seconds by my wristwatch. Subsequent loads took about 3 seconds. That should be fast enough for anyone, except maybe for people who compulsively close every application that they haven't used in the last 30 seconds.
Once loaded, it seems to sit and wait for me to type something about as quickly as any other program.
Or you can not install Rockbox and still do the same thing.
Same here, which is why we avoid Microsoft lock-in like the plague it is. Do you have the luxury of watching your hard work vaporize because the next version of Word drops some of the functions you use, and the current version won't run on Windows 7? Maybe you'll get lucky and neither of those will happen. A lot of us in IT aren't so lucky, though, and have watched the rug get pulled out from under us on key projects.
I'd been getting calls from "Card Services", representing themselves as being with my credit card company, once a day or so for a while. I whipped out a short blog entry one day just to vent, and somehow ended up with several thousands hits per month on it. Apparently I wasn't the only one they were driving crazy. It's good to see that these cretins are finally being reined in.
Here's something that might surprise a lot of people: the current Republican leadership has a lot of us rank-and-file party members fit to be tied. Now, I'm certain that a lot of Republicans think Bush is the greatest thing since Napster v1, but the people I've personally spoke to think that he (and those like him) are nuts. We want freedom. We want smaller government - including reducing the military and corporate subsidies. We want the right to live our lives as free adults and do whatever makes us happy with other adults.
I don't know anything about Krvaric and his policies. Maybe he's a Bushist neocon. That's certainly possible. Still, there's a big possibility that he's as sick of the current fiasco as you and I are and truly wants something different. Don't assume that (R) automatically means "corporate overlord" because it doesn't. I understand how the higherups give that impression, but it's just not universally true.
Piracy is a lot more premeditated than drunk driving. If that politician organized fleets of drunk drivers, knowing it was generally held to be illegal, I'd imagine that you could consider them an expert on driving law. Especially if they never got convicted for having done it.
It's not that interesting that someone with an unconventional past rises up through political ranks. The real question for me is whether he retains any of those earlier values. Since he knows a whole lot more about copyright than most, what's his take on the DMCA etc.? Does his political record have much to say about it?
That doesn't seem so unreasonable. For example, my company's employee handbook doesn't have a copyright notice, and the business owns all copies of it.
Yeah, you're right. Saying that it's dangerous to take away someone's option not to penalize you is exactly like saying you should never be penalized. I concede. Whatever.
I'm talking about before the judge rules. Suppose that the plaintiffs realizes their mistake after the courts are involved but before the final judgment. In that event, unscrupulous plaintiffs may decide they're better off fighting tooth and nail to prevent being proven wrong rather than trying to back down and facing penalties.
The problem is that it gives the plaintiffs a strong reason not to back down, even if they want to. Their choices become: 1) say "I'm sorry" and get fined by the judge, or 2) say "oh, crud" and throw in every legal resource at their disposal in the hope that you'll get scared (or go bankrupt) and give in.
I've read that when kidnapping became a capital crime, that the percentage of victims killed skyrocketed because the kidnappers perceived that their odds of escaping justice were better with a dead witness. If they were caught, they'd be executed anyway, so why not do everything possible to stack the deck? That may or may not be true, and there's a quantitative difference between kidnapping and a civil lawsuit, but I think the principle stands.
Oh, I totally agree with that. It just seems to me that the alternative is the same situation with judges and lawyers thrown in for good measure. That's about the only way I can think of to make it even worse.
Oh, nice. I hadn't seen that yet.
BTW, you really should give Xandros a chance. I figured I'd hate it, but I've been happily using it for a couple months. The only problem I had with it was the hassle of adding extra packages, like the major PITA of installing Kopete. It's otherwise been stable, lightweight, quick-booting, and generally pleasant to use. This from someone who always does the FreeBSD minimal install so that I can build the rest of the system the way I want it.
I'm pretty averse to involving the legal system unnecessarily. In this example, two private parties worked it out and moved on. Imagine the same scenario, except now the plaintiff faces penalties from a pissed-off judge if they admit they're wrong and want to drop their case. No, I think this worked exactly like it should.
BTW, I didn't mean for the mods to take that "Redundant" joke seriously. Sorry about that.
Any idea if they borrowed that from FreeBSD, which also has generally good Linux emulation?
I've been using the built-in Xandros distro for the last couple of months. It's OK, but I really miss the upgradeability and conveniently huge software repositories of Debian and Ubuntu. However, it seem like if I switch to one of those then I'd have to give up all the special features, like Fn+F2 to toggle the WiFi or Fn+F7 to mute the speakers. Are there any nice, modern distros that suppport all the functionality of the hacked-up Xandros that ships with it?
BTW, I know I can Google this. I'd just rather discuss it here.
You're new to that whole "great outdoors" thing, aren't you?
Do Firefox, Konqueror etc. not compile on ARM?
The Atom devices and their counterparts from via will run modern operating systems (but not vista)-1: Redundant
I have an Eee PC for work. It has GCC, Python, Emacs, and the PostgreSQL client programs installed. You say "notepad with spellcheck". I say "tiny development system that lets me telecommute from my backyard on sunny days".
For me (and apparently millions of others), the Eee PC is the sweet spot for portable computing. It's small enough that I don't think twice about dragging it along wherever I'm going, and yet big enough that I'm not giving up anything. No "portable OS" will ever match the flexibility it offers.