I was worried there for a minute. As for the "no consoles" thing, they think the 360 is too weak? Are they kidding? There are a lot of people who can't even afford a 360, nevermind the PS3.. and they expect to market their game to the "teenagers with enough free time but also somehow have hojillions of dollars" niche?
Oh, waa! Listen here, sonny. People like me used to need systems that cost thousands of 1980's dollars just to be able to play games that sucked compared to what you get on a GBA today... and we were thankful.
Oh, and I would argue that except for the slashdot single 30-something nerd demographic, the segment of the market with the largest disposable income are teenagers with no fixed expenses who otherwise mooch off their parents, live in the basement, and have a part-time job.
After my mortgage and fixed expenses, the total dollar amount of my income that I can use for frivoloties like game consoles and games is probably less than when I had summer jobs in college.
A grim warning to all of us about the dangers of complex technology, miniaturization, standardization, passage of time, and making things too easy...
We're dumbing ourselves down to the point that no single person is fully capable of understanding all of the technology that is currently in place. We're just consumers of existing technology and we may add some little bit to existing technology, but we never fully understand all of the current technology well enough to reimplement it.
Here are some examples:
Take the "A conneticut yankee in King Arthur's court" example: Many smart mechanically inclined people could go back in time and using basic materials, they could recreate many modern innovations like electric motor, battery, internal combustion engine, simple airplane, FM radio, etc.
But... now take the "post-apocalyptic, only a few survivors left to rebuild the world" example: I'd wager that nearly NOBODY could recreate even a simple CPU, a digital watch, a TV, an ipod, a cellular phone, the internet, a spacecraft.
I'm reminded of when I was traveling through southern Thailand in 1993 and my 486/dx2/100 laptop broke. Many people in the local cities had cell phones, but almost no other technology or understanding of it existed locally. I finally found a computer store, went in, looked around at their old 286 motherboards lying around, showed them my laptop and asked if they could fix it, and they just gazed at it as if I had brought them a piece of a UFO.
Or look at the challenges of reading old video formats, old tape archive formats, old floppy disks that were written on sligtly miscalibrated drives, old hard drives that use interfaces not currently available, old file formats that are no longer popular and no longer easy to convert... there are a lot of ways we can lose massive amounts of information that most people no longer learn/study/know.
I'm just saying that if even NASA can lose skills and knowledge about their core business, then it can happen to others as well, and it could happen on a much larger scale.
ry to stay ontopic, dude. We're talking enterprise environments, not development machines.
In large software development shops, enterprise desktop environments *are* (also) development machines.
Oh how nice it must be to work somewhere where a closely managed desktop environment where users don't have root or Administrator access is the corporate standard
These two are often not an issue in corporate environments though.
Aah, but just try to take them away from primadonna developers and see how much they scream about their need to play mp3s and FPS games at work or how the company "owes" them some freedom, or how 3D is required for Java, or how the corporate VoIP initiative means they need to have the best possible sound on their desktop/laptop.
Seriously, sometimes I think that workers today have gotten used to too much freedom, and aren't doing enough work for their companies. If my employees spent all day on Slashdot, I'd... oh wait...
If you want desktop consolidation/virtualization/migration off of Windows projects to be successful, my opinion is that there are two roads to success:
1) slow, steady, persistent grassroots campaigning for many years
2) a mandate from the leaders of your organization that nobody is allowed to challenge (thus, everyone is forced to 'make it work' instead of spending their energy/efforts poking holes in the strategy.
iSCSI has a whole bunch of things going for it -- it allows sharing SAN storage over ethernet on the WAN, it lowers the cost of SAN clustering. It works on existing NAS storage that supports iSCSI, it works with SAN storage with a FC to ethernet switch like the Cisco MDS 9000
ATA over ethernet doesn't work on enterprise NAS or SAN storage. ATA over ethernet doesn't provide any redundany or fault tolerance without hardware RAID on storage or software RAID on the client.
ATA over ethernet also is not available for a wide variety of guest OS platforms, whereas iSCSI currently is available for many OSes.
Sad to see the end of an era, but the internet and RSS effectively take nearly all of the mystery, excitement, and suspense out of traveling to a computer trade show.
The only suspense left is related to unsubstantiated rumors, blurry prototype photos on blogger sites, and actualy press releases by companies.
I remember years ago how exciting the West Coast Computer Fair was -- small vendors trying to show off something special that you would otherwise never see or know about, then I remember Comdex - people coming from all over the world to unveil new products.
Nobody waits for a trade show now to unveil anything - everyone wants a jump on their competition, and consumers don't want to wait for information that they could be reading about in their RSS feed readers every day.
As a result, people feel less and less inclined to go to trade shows when they already know all there is to know about the PS3, the Wii, the Xbox 360's giant external power transformer, the new games, etc.
I remember the excitement of collecting vendor trinkets and carrying HUGE bags of product literature around for days on end. Who's going to do that now? I mean... maybe jot down a few urls in your PDA, but... traveling to collect BAGS of literature? That's so last century.
Don't they remember the results of the Challenger inquest, wherein plenty of evidence of engineers saying "DON'T LAUNCH! BAAAAD!" was ignored?
Well, in all fairness, going into space is BY DEFINITION unsafe. I'm sure that there have been engineers on every single space launch that have said, "Don't launch! BAAAAD!", just as I'm sure that there have been engineers on every software release that have said, "Don't release! BAAAAD!".
Actually, I'm positive there are WAY more software engineers saying that than NASA engineers...
At some level, life is all about risks. How many of us have driven 50,000 miles in a car that was later recalled? How many of us depend on beta software? How many of us have driven in our car without a seatbelt? How many of us have played with fireworks or other explosives? Run with scissors? Held a lighter in front of a lysol can? Gone for that second beer bong? Skateboarded down a steep hill? Bought stock in tech companies?
Where there is no risk, there is no reward. Risk management is a balancing act.
I think the real reason they're all going proprietary (and not providing SDKs) is because the service providers don't want there to be an easy way for anybody but them to make applications for the phones.
Bingo!
Just look at the phone services today and how much they're trying to charge for things that users could do for free...
couple of bucks PER MONTH for privilege of sending text messages
overage charges if you send too many text messages. Come on! TEXT MESSAGES! This is a miniscule amount of data compared to voice.
Pay for IM client
couple of bucks to download a ringtone or a backdrop pic!
couple of bucks to download a lame java game
couple of bucks PER MONTH to get email notifications about something
require use of airtime to transfer photos via email
no Wireless support to allow free data transfer (because someone might come up with a VoIP client for phones, I'm sure). Why can't I surf the web from my phone using wireless when it's in range and *NOT* have to pay cellular charges
Seriously, the US is so far behind in cell phone technology and customer services options compared to Asia, it's not even funny.
Good luck to all those people living in Arizona and Nevada - you're entering a spiraling heat wave. Once people build up the land with houses and roads, the cars, pollution, and A/C makes the air even hotter.
Oh, and with much of China and India either already a desert or turning into a desert due to deforestation thousands of years ago, it's not going to get any better for them.
The desert is actually spreading too - look at China in google earth and see how much of China is sand, and with hunter/gatherer populations foraging for food and fuel, animals eating every plant that springs up from the earth, and pavement being laid down everywhere to speed rain runoff and reduce the amount of water that saturates the soil - the situation looks bleak.
Seriously, I hate to sound like a tree hugging hippie, but if everyone in the world planted a few trees, I believe we could have a positive impact on the global climate
I'll wager that most of us live somewhere that is mostly urban and that most of the dirt we encounter in our daily lives is not at all like the kind of rich organic earth that surround farms.
Urban dirt is made up of unburnt hydrocarbons, dog poo, cigarette butts, sputum, and bird droppings and it doesn't contain much in the way of nutrients needed to grow plants in.
While it might help your immune system to eat urban dirt, I can't say I'm surprised that fewer parents in urbanized areas are telling their kids to go out an eat a peck of dirt.
We all loved it with no ads, and then something happened and we debated about whether or not to add ads to slashdot, and it basically came down to, "we have to if we want to survive". Faced with that, most slashdotters preferred slashdot with ads to no slashdot.
If craigslist can survive without pimping ads to users, more power to them, and their userbase will only grow.
This is speculation on my part, but I know that most arid countries have invested very heavily in large reverse osmosis plants that provide a significant portion of their fresh drinking water (anyone have stats?).
As the global population shoots up, and people continue trying to find ways to make inhabitable land habitable, I only see this trend increasing.
Is it possible that we could end up sucking up enough water out of the oceans and redistributing it that we could change not ocean levels?
At first thought it sounds rather improbable, but then again... years ago I wouldn't have believed that coal mines in China could dirty the entire world, either.
We've looked at it for internal use, but it's so *different*, there appear to be a bunch of compatibility issues for running a pure IPv6 network and everyone thinks it's weird and counter-intuitive.
I'd really like to see dozens of replies from people using this... because I'd say that IPv6 adoption right now is going about as well as metric system adoption in the US has gone.
Use a database for storing your important data and audit all updates/changes.
The real value of spreadsheets anyway are more for formatting or prototyping. You can get any reporting you need out of a databse -- you just have to have it defined before you start.
Spreadseets are to accounting what IM conversations are to literature.
Okay, I call shenanigans. This just sounds too ridiculous to be real.
How many times in the past have we see some tech story get reported on and posted on slashdot only to find out that it was all trumped up - like "toothing" - people in UK using bluetooth phones to look for sex partners? I say "nerd fight club" is the same thing.
Everyone knows that real dorks adverse to physical fitness - I mean, hey why go outside when you can spend more time in front of the computer? I'll exercise next week after I rebuild my second desktop system and finish upgrading my asterisk pbx...
Oh, and nerd *fighting*? Nerds are the last people who are going to want to blow off steam by real, painful, physical fighting... Everyone knows that. Nerds would invite others for a frag-fest, whomp on their mmorpg character, hack their coworker's/nemesis' home server, and fill their cubicle with styrofoam... but fight... and risk getting hurt?
If we liked to fight, we probably wouldn't have followed the path that made us nerds in the first place.
I remember when DBAs were screaming that they only wanted 1 and 2gb disks and as many spindles as possible, and at that time, it was the 9gb SCSI drives that were BAD because they we too big and people wanted more spindles
Then the DBAs wanted to horde 9gb drives because 36gb drives were too large and they wanted as many spindles as possible.
Now DBAs only want the 72gb drives because the 144s and 250s are too large and they want as many spindles as possible
I guarantee that a few years from now, we'll read about the DBAs wanting only 750gb drives because the 3tb drives are too large and they want as many spindles as possible
I'm guessing that they plan to use sharepoint server with a database backend and ODBC on the users' spreadsheets to allow users to treat databases as spreadsheets. Spreadsheets really are an intuitive inteface for updating data. Distributed storage of critical data is the dumb thing.
But... we all know that what is going to end up happening is that.xls files will grow from 400mb to 45gb with embedded videos, dynamically updated rss tickers inside of cells, and a million rows of junk formatting with different background colors, fonts, outlining, and custom ribbon menus.
That's what the history books will record. Corporate interests stifled freedom and creativity so much that the companies pushing this CRIPPLED new technology actually were not able to find buyers and more and more ANALOG-based innovation continued.
Expect to see more digital-to-analog converters, more people paying *LESS* to get ANALOG cable TV, more people less willing to pay extra for HDTV, more people happy to have analog-based PVRs and not have their recorded sports games automatically erased, or see messages from pay movie channels that state this content cannot be recorded.
I, for one, am in NO HURRY WHATSOEVER to purchase any digital tv devices.
We need a cool catchy name for Analog TV - something like Fair use TV or unencumbered TV.
We need a crummy name for HDTV - something like Restricted use TV.
The MPAA is ready to fall on their swords for forced digital rights - they seem to not see any way to profit that doesn't involve controlling every device between them and me. I'll be damned if I'm going to give up control of my devices to the MPAA or RIAA.... UNLESS THEY GIVE ME AN EXTRA DEVICE FOR FREE. WHEN THE MPAA PROVIDES MY FLATSCREEN, TUNER, AND PVR AND ALL SUPPORT AND MAINTENANCE, I'LL GLADLY ACCEPT THEIR CONTENT UNDER THEIR TERMS.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, waa! Listen here, sonny. People like me used to need systems that cost thousands of 1980's dollars just to be able to play games that sucked compared to what you get on a GBA today... and we were thankful.
Oh, and I would argue that except for the slashdot single 30-something nerd demographic, the segment of the market with the largest disposable income are teenagers with no fixed expenses who otherwise mooch off their parents, live in the basement, and have a part-time job.
After my mortgage and fixed expenses, the total dollar amount of my income that I can use for frivoloties like game consoles and games is probably less than when I had summer jobs in college.
For shame! You must work in accounting not in IT, huh?
I hope you get busted and lose your job.
A grim warning to all of us about the dangers of complex technology, miniaturization, standardization, passage of time, and making things too easy...
We're dumbing ourselves down to the point that no single person is fully capable of understanding all of the technology that is currently in place. We're just consumers of existing technology and we may add some little bit to existing technology, but we never fully understand all of the current technology well enough to reimplement it.
Here are some examples:
Take the "A conneticut yankee in King Arthur's court" example: Many smart mechanically inclined people could go back in time and using basic materials, they could recreate many modern innovations like electric motor, battery, internal combustion engine, simple airplane, FM radio, etc.
But... now take the "post-apocalyptic, only a few survivors left to rebuild the world" example: I'd wager that nearly NOBODY could recreate even a simple CPU, a digital watch, a TV, an ipod, a cellular phone, the internet, a spacecraft.
I'm reminded of when I was traveling through southern Thailand in 1993 and my 486/dx2/100 laptop broke. Many people in the local cities had cell phones, but almost no other technology or understanding of it existed locally. I finally found a computer store, went in, looked around at their old 286 motherboards lying around, showed them my laptop and asked if they could fix it, and they just gazed at it as if I had brought them a piece of a UFO.
Or look at the challenges of reading old video formats, old tape archive formats, old floppy disks that were written on sligtly miscalibrated drives, old hard drives that use interfaces not currently available, old file formats that are no longer popular and no longer easy to convert... there are a lot of ways we can lose massive amounts of information that most people no longer learn/study/know.
I'm just saying that if even NASA can lose skills and knowledge about their core business, then it can happen to others as well, and it could happen on a much larger scale.
In large software development shops, enterprise desktop environments *are* (also) development machines.
Oh how nice it must be to work somewhere where a closely managed desktop environment where users don't have root or Administrator access is the corporate standard
Aah, but just try to take them away from primadonna developers and see how much they scream about their need to play mp3s and FPS games at work or how the company "owes" them some freedom, or how 3D is required for Java, or how the corporate VoIP initiative means they need to have the best possible sound on their desktop/laptop.
Seriously, sometimes I think that workers today have gotten used to too much freedom, and aren't doing enough work for their companies. If my employees spent all day on Slashdot, I'd... oh wait...
If you want desktop consolidation/virtualization/migration off of Windows projects to be successful, my opinion is that there are two roads to success:
1) slow, steady, persistent grassroots campaigning for many years
2) a mandate from the leaders of your organization that nobody is allowed to challenge (thus, everyone is forced to 'make it work' instead of spending their energy/efforts poking holes in the strategy.
If you want to disable the stupid fricking windows key, get "I hate this key" and watch your FPS performance improve
t ml
http://www.majorgeeks.com/I_Hate_This_Key_d3805.h
Or... go on ebay and look for a vintage IBM keyboard with no stupid Windows key on it
iSCSI has a whole bunch of things going for it -- it allows sharing SAN storage over ethernet on the WAN, it lowers the cost of SAN clustering. It works on existing NAS storage that supports iSCSI, it works with SAN storage with a FC to ethernet switch like the Cisco MDS 9000
ATA over ethernet doesn't work on enterprise NAS or SAN storage. ATA over ethernet doesn't provide any redundany or fault tolerance without hardware RAID on storage or software RAID on the client.
ATA over ethernet also is not available for a wide variety of guest OS platforms, whereas iSCSI currently is available for many OSes.
Sad to see the end of an era, but the internet and RSS effectively take nearly all of the mystery, excitement, and suspense out of traveling to a computer trade show.
The only suspense left is related to unsubstantiated rumors, blurry prototype photos on blogger sites, and actualy press releases by companies.
I remember years ago how exciting the West Coast Computer Fair was -- small vendors trying to show off something special that you would otherwise never see or know about, then I remember Comdex - people coming from all over the world to unveil new products.
Nobody waits for a trade show now to unveil anything - everyone wants a jump on their competition, and consumers don't want to wait for information that they could be reading about in their RSS feed readers every day.
As a result, people feel less and less inclined to go to trade shows when they already know all there is to know about the PS3, the Wii, the Xbox 360's giant external power transformer, the new games, etc.
I remember the excitement of collecting vendor trinkets and carrying HUGE bags of product literature around for days on end. Who's going to do that now? I mean... maybe jot down a few urls in your PDA, but... traveling to collect BAGS of literature? That's so last century.
Intel will see AMD's 4x4 with their Core 4 quadro and raise them with their uber-secret
Mega-Core-8-octo Pentium-Z MMVII Pro ultra-thread 999 energy-star
Don't they remember the results of the Challenger inquest, wherein plenty of evidence of engineers saying "DON'T LAUNCH! BAAAAD!" was ignored?
Well, in all fairness, going into space is BY DEFINITION unsafe. I'm sure that there have been engineers on every single space launch that have said, "Don't launch! BAAAAD!", just as I'm sure that there have been engineers on every software release that have said, "Don't release! BAAAAD!".
Actually, I'm positive there are WAY more software engineers saying that than NASA engineers...
At some level, life is all about risks. How many of us have driven 50,000 miles in a car that was later recalled? How many of us depend on beta software? How many of us have driven in our car without a seatbelt? How many of us have played with fireworks or other explosives? Run with scissors? Held a lighter in front of a lysol can? Gone for that second beer bong? Skateboarded down a steep hill? Bought stock in tech companies?
Where there is no risk, there is no reward. Risk management is a balancing act.
If I were going to try to make money with revenue sharing from video downloads, I'd go straight for porn video clips.
The reality is that most people would rather watch porn than someone's vlog or singing elmo video.
Literally everyone on the road is talking on their cellphone when they drive and for the most part traffic on the freeways moves along nicely.
This study would lead one to believe that we are unfairly punishing drivers who are under the influence.
couple of bucks PER MONTH for privilege of sending text messages
overage charges if you send too many text messages. Come on! TEXT MESSAGES! This is a miniscule amount of data compared to voice.
Pay for IM client
couple of bucks to download a ringtone or a backdrop pic!
couple of bucks to download a lame java game
couple of bucks PER MONTH to get email notifications about something
require use of airtime to transfer photos via email
no Wireless support to allow free data transfer (because someone might come up with a VoIP client for phones, I'm sure). Why can't I surf the web from my phone using wireless when it's in range and *NOT* have to pay cellular charges Seriously, the US is so far behind in cell phone technology and customer services options compared to Asia, it's not even funny.
Good luck to all those people living in Arizona and Nevada - you're entering a spiraling heat wave. Once people build up the land with houses and roads, the cars, pollution, and A/C makes the air even hotter.
Oh, and with much of China and India either already a desert or turning into a desert due to deforestation thousands of years ago, it's not going to get any better for them.
The desert is actually spreading too - look at China in google earth and see how much of China is sand, and with hunter/gatherer populations foraging for food and fuel, animals eating every plant that springs up from the earth, and pavement being laid down everywhere to speed rain runoff and reduce the amount of water that saturates the soil - the situation looks bleak.
Seriously, I hate to sound like a tree hugging hippie, but if everyone in the world planted a few trees, I believe we could have a positive impact on the global climate
Regarding eating a peck of dirt...
I'll wager that most of us live somewhere that is mostly urban and that most of the dirt we encounter in our daily lives is not at all like the kind of rich organic earth that surround farms.
Urban dirt is made up of unburnt hydrocarbons, dog poo, cigarette butts, sputum, and bird droppings and it doesn't contain much in the way of nutrients needed to grow plants in.
While it might help your immune system to eat urban dirt, I can't say I'm surprised that fewer parents in urbanized areas are telling their kids to go out an eat a peck of dirt.
We all loved it with no ads, and then something happened and we debated about whether or not to add ads to slashdot, and it basically came down to, "we have to if we want to survive". Faced with that, most slashdotters preferred slashdot with ads to no slashdot.
If craigslist can survive without pimping ads to users, more power to them, and their userbase will only grow.
This is speculation on my part, but I know that most arid countries have invested very heavily in large reverse osmosis plants that provide a significant portion of their fresh drinking water (anyone have stats?).
As the global population shoots up, and people continue trying to find ways to make inhabitable land habitable, I only see this trend increasing.
Is it possible that we could end up sucking up enough water out of the oceans and redistributing it that we could change not ocean levels?
At first thought it sounds rather improbable, but then again... years ago I wouldn't have believed that coal mines in China could dirty the entire world, either.
Solaris 2.6 remains relatively rock solid. Solaris 8 - rock solid, HPUX 10.X - solid
A representative Linux of that day would be Redhat 5.2... Not quite solid
Heck, I still have some Solaris 2.4 servers running that I have few reasons to touch.
Seriously.
We've looked at it for internal use, but it's so *different*, there appear to be a bunch of compatibility issues for running a pure IPv6 network and everyone thinks it's weird and counter-intuitive.
I'd really like to see dozens of replies from people using this... because I'd say that IPv6 adoption right now is going about as well as metric system adoption in the US has gone.
Use a database for storing your important data and audit all updates/changes.
The real value of spreadsheets anyway are more for formatting or prototyping. You can get any reporting you need out of a databse -- you just have to have it defined before you start.
Spreadseets are to accounting what IM conversations are to literature.
Article summary should read: 'What happens when you coworker steals your red swingline stapler? ...It's soap making time!"
Tag should be: 'dumbass'
Okay, I call shenanigans. This just sounds too ridiculous to be real.
How many times in the past have we see some tech story get reported on and posted on slashdot only to find out that it was all trumped up - like "toothing" - people in UK using bluetooth phones to look for sex partners? I say "nerd fight club" is the same thing.
Everyone knows that real dorks adverse to physical fitness - I mean, hey why go outside when you can spend more time in front of the computer? I'll exercise next week after I rebuild my second desktop system and finish upgrading my asterisk pbx...
Oh, and nerd *fighting*? Nerds are the last people who are going to want to blow off steam by real, painful, physical fighting... Everyone knows that. Nerds would invite others for a frag-fest, whomp on their mmorpg character, hack their coworker's/nemesis' home server, and fill their cubicle with styrofoam... but fight... and risk getting hurt?
If we liked to fight, we probably wouldn't have followed the path that made us nerds in the first place.
I remember when DBAs were screaming that they only wanted 1 and 2gb disks and as many spindles as possible, and at that time, it was the 9gb SCSI drives that were BAD because they we too big and people wanted more spindles
Then the DBAs wanted to horde 9gb drives because 36gb drives were too large and they wanted as many spindles as possible.
Now DBAs only want the 72gb drives because the 144s and 250s are too large and they want as many spindles as possible
I guarantee that a few years from now, we'll read about the DBAs wanting only 750gb drives because the 3tb drives are too large and they want as many spindles as possible
I'm guessing that they plan to use sharepoint server with a database backend and ODBC on the users' spreadsheets to allow users to treat databases as spreadsheets. Spreadsheets really are an intuitive inteface for updating data. Distributed storage of critical data is the dumb thing.
.xls files will grow from 400mb to 45gb with embedded videos, dynamically updated rss tickers inside of cells, and a million rows of junk formatting with different background colors, fonts, outlining, and custom ribbon menus.
But... we all know that what is going to end up happening is that
That's what the history books will record. Corporate interests stifled freedom and creativity so much that the companies pushing this CRIPPLED new technology actually were not able to find buyers and more and more ANALOG-based innovation continued.
... UNLESS THEY GIVE ME AN EXTRA DEVICE FOR FREE. WHEN THE MPAA PROVIDES MY FLATSCREEN, TUNER, AND PVR AND ALL SUPPORT AND MAINTENANCE, I'LL GLADLY ACCEPT THEIR CONTENT UNDER THEIR TERMS.
Expect to see more digital-to-analog converters, more people paying *LESS* to get ANALOG cable TV, more people less willing to pay extra for HDTV, more people happy to have analog-based PVRs and not have their recorded sports games automatically erased, or see messages from pay movie channels that state this content cannot be recorded.
I, for one, am in NO HURRY WHATSOEVER to purchase any digital tv devices.
We need a cool catchy name for Analog TV - something like Fair use TV or unencumbered TV.
We need a crummy name for HDTV - something like Restricted use TV.
The MPAA is ready to fall on their swords for forced digital rights - they seem to not see any way to profit that doesn't involve controlling every device between them and me. I'll be damned if I'm going to give up control of my devices to the MPAA or RIAA.