It would have to be marketed and priced correctly. I'm thinking in the 300-500 dollar price range, with a 20" display of decent resolution, wireless keyboard and mouse, and possibly something akin to a Wii infrared controller. Then they'd basically have to market it like Apple did the iMac all those years ago when it was initially offered.
For maybe $250, if they were to do the same thing but as a dock for Android phones of 4.0 or greater release, I'd buy one.
The Transformer has done much what you say, but to the Netbook market. It's easily 1 out of every 2 "small laptops" I see now. People seem to do OK using it as a full on replacement, and many even prefer it over a Windows 7 machine or a Mac, from what I've seen.
I think you've just made the most ignorant insulting comment I've seen on slashdot. Congratulations.
How is this prejudiced? All of the above stated things happened in roughly a generation of when the respective immigrant groups started setting foot on US soil, often due to societal pressures to do so (in part). Go to any neighborhood in the Bronx or Brooklyn (well, almost) and ask one of them what their cultural identity is - you'll almost invariably get "I'm an American". They identify with the American cultural ethos.
Do the same in, oh, pretty much anywhere in Arizona or southern Texas, where wanton immigration has been occurring for the past 40 years, and you'll probably get "I'm a Latino" or "I'm Mexican".
Yes, they still had their cultural and societal problems. (Hell, you can see - to this day - both the positive and negative marks of immigrant cultures throughout the US, such as both pizza in New York and the Northeast having the biggest problems with alcoholism and collusive government/corporations).
Yeah I'm guessing this is geared more towards people who do the whole vendor support thing, and they've got a handful (or at least one) person dedicated to maintaining specific equipment (eg. linux servers vs. switches). Homogenous is key, but high thread count will also push ARM advantage here, because you could fit (say) 8 of these small systems with multiple CPUs each in a single 2U without much issue, and still leverage your SAN storage.
You'll probably see them in low-end "server" devices too, I imagine. Eventually. Unless you're running stuff that'll compile and run on ARM, it probably gives you no advantage unless it's worth recompiling/running it on something with a GPU. If Windows 2010 were available for ARM, running a terminal server cluster might be useful, for instance (depending on how big your dept is).
With AMD's experience in x86, if anyone can push ARM to the server/desktop it's them. If they can standardize on things like the 'BIOS' for their own products, I'm sure many smaller companies will follow. (You're already seeing a degree of standardization eg. with integrators like Samsung, but that's now where AMD is going with this, exactly.)
For SMB - say, IT shops with fewer than a dozen identical systems now, or special use cases needing GPU (eg. scientific computing), this is a non-starter, at least for now. Think high flung web shops, cloud computing, and the like.
If AMD can push their engineering into ARM quickly, they might not only stand a chance but they might dominate fairly quickly, I'd think. They're not on par with Intel on die size, but IIRC they're pretty close - that knowledge is certainly applicable.
Remember, they've got good GPUs already. A lot of what they tried to do with the Mobility and later generations were very "ARM-like" already, it just didn't exactly work due to x86 limitations. I'd think they've got a pretty good chance overall. (If anything, it's a big market. Tegra# are really pushing NVidia along, after all...)
The only thing Steam needs a hard drive for is storing cached game data, savegames, and profile data cache.
There's no reason why they couldn't just set up a "SteamOS" LiveCD to mount and troll all attached storage for their Steam cache. It shouldn't matter if it's on NTFS (and thus available from Windows as well) or ext4 or zfs for that matter.
How is this any different than Steam on Windows on a laptop, desktop, or a different desktop? Surprise! Different hardware has different performance characteristics, as do different drivers, etc. - this is an endemic part of PC gaming and always has been.
This is a non-issue and, really, is indicative of not understanding the issue. Hardware here really isn't so much the problem as it is the software. Fortunately, most games today can run on some fairly low-end systems with integrated AMD hardware, or even the newer Intel chips.
A bigger problem would be, I believe, the different distributions and their various versions, security related implementations (SuSE comes to mind), desktop environments, and releases. They can hit a pretty big part of the target by focusing on Ubuntu's LTS and possibly the following.10 release as those same packages will (probably) work on Debian and other similar Debian based distributions, or they could even use alien to create the debs from RPMs to hit Fedora/Redhat/Debian/Ubuntu all at once. Fairly trivial - Oracle/Sun has been doing something similar quite well for years for Virtualbox, for instance.
Overall, I don't think it'll be all that different than the historic issues people have had with different driver or DirectX issues in Windows (still a significant problem IME). The biggest reason Linux hasn't taken off in the past decade at home is because people want iTunes, flash and the like and don't want to have to install an OS. A "gaming platform" would fix things for Valve pretty damn quickly, especially if it could boot up in under 30s and provide all the user's games to him in that timeframe.
So basically, it's the ultimate irony that this guy built a ship for someone like Jobs, who has seemed content doing the same thing to his pretentious customers for the past decade+.
Indeed. This ship looks like something a 3rd grader might draw, or a floating California mansion, take your pick. It's all hard angles with no angular cohesion, and it's as dimensionally awkward as a Picasso painting.
Basically, aside from the white, it's everything an Apple product isn't.
Not all that unusual. We have a circular supercell during the winter out here in the upper Midwest with considerable regularity. "Hurricane force winds" is commonly stated, and not always associated with a circular supercell. It's just common.
Yes, it is 'only' a category one hurricane. That is going to cover ALL of Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and parts of Virginia, Kentucky, West Virginia, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine with at least tropical storm force winds.
So, in other words, it's not that different than the winter storms we regularly get out here in the Montana, Nebraska, North/South Dakota, Minnesota regions of the country where we'll have 2-4 days of gale force winds, blowing ice and/or snow, zero visibility, and 15' drifts at regular intervals? You know, the ones we'll sometimes have 2-3 times a winter.
The only really significant thing about this, IMO, is the storm surge. That's pretty damn bad. It's basically a "New Orleans diagnosis" except there's nothing to be done for it.
(That said, we have some fairly regular flooding out on the prairie, too. Like when the eastern half of the state of Nebraska was flooded just recently here, for most of a year.)
Rome was pretty diverse (after Roman citizenry ceased to have meaning and the Republic became an Empire, shortly before its fall). That was around when Rome started giving food and entertainment to the masses.
By and large, because they aren't allowed in currently?
I know quite a few British people who have in-demand skills and a positive gross net worth who have been denied work vistas (or immigration vistas, or anything else they've applied for) in the past decade. The US does not favor skilled laborers from other modern countries, it only favors moderately capable laborers from 3rd world countries, refugees of questionable dogmatic affiliation, and people who enter the country illegally. It's the only way to sooth our collective cultural white guilt.
My immigrant ancestors assimilated into the culture. Yes, they brought their own culture, but by and large (and in no small part, under the threat of force by the government), they adopted the rules and standards of their new homeland. See: Irishmen becoming educated, Italians starting legitimate businesses, Germans ceasing to be proud Germans (all of which added a very crucial part to the cultural ethics and fabric of the nation).
Travel through San Francisco some time, or any other current immigrant ghetto (there are a lot of them now), and tell me how well you think those people have assimilated into the culture of the US. Sorry, they really haven't.
Yep. They're not able to get a wife here (or there, which is why they're probably here), so there's nothing to allow them to stay.
They go back home, get the wife, and basically use the experience gained here to kickstart the industry they were working in here, but in their own country. The biggest thing H1B does is foster foreign competition and degrade our local pool of experienced people. The US lumber industry is a good example of what happens when you outsource your production costs...
Ok, so that's cool and all. Did you bother thinking?
H1B workers only come into "in-demand" careers in highly competitive fields where large amounts of sensitive data is concerned. You're ignoring crucial things like:
* This diminishes domestic demand for employees, resulting in both fewer people entering the fields and lower wages * These people are taking jobs in industries with a fraction of that 150 million number. (How big is the IT industry? The biotech industry? Etc.) * On the lower side of the pay scale, there are illegals taking jobs and driving down the price for cheap labor as well.
We're already at the point in the US where people well into their 20s can look forward to "dorming" well into their 30s with housemates and roommates, and where many are still living at home because of higher costs and minimal opportunity. This is partially their fault (for picking something like an English major in college), but not everyone can be an engineer. God knows even those who are (regardless of race or culture) are rarely up to snuff.
My personal experience with Indian H1B workers is that there are a lot of them. They're upwards of 10%-30% of the IT workers I've seen. Some are very good, exceptional even. Many, if not most, are no better than and not as good as "common" DeVry types. Most of them lack crucial problem solving skills which are a "given" in Western cultures. Now, imagine for a second if there were 10% more jobs in IT oriented fields than there are now, and had been since H1B workers became common place. Would wages be lower? No, they'd probably be higher than they are now by a fair margin, making comparable amounts to other "skilled professional" careers with similar experience - as opposed to markedly less than eg. civil engineers or the like. A crucial point to consider is that there is a very large number of skilled, experienced, and unemployed people in the US right now who are looking for work (or in some cases, have stopped trying) who are "unemployable" because they're too old, too experienced, or two "American" (what with being insistent about only working 40-45 hours a week, or the like).
I wonder if either of the Presidential candidates would dare to say that on their first day of office, they would create 65,000 high-paying, skilled domestic employment opportunities. It could be done fairly trivially, and there are certainly close to that number of Americans looking for work in in-demand fields. So why not hire a 22 year old college grad from the US than a 21 year old Indian with questionable education or experience?
Absolutely. My company abides by the same principle: don't put all your eggs in one basket.:) Diversity is key, and making a buyer/seller relationship one-sided is incredibly easy when one side needs the business of the other more than the opposite is true. The best thing a company can do for itself is to try to provide a product which will help their customers not need them any longer as a supplier, and vice versa - the customer will keep coming back because they want your product.
This is, after all, why Intel has been so dependent upon the existence of AMD for the past decade. They really do need each other; without AMD, Intel would have no excuse it could use with its shareholders to not gouge its customers, thus hurting the bottom line (and ultimately the shareholders).
It really doesn't matter if they found someone to buy comparable numbers at a profitable price or if they simply dropped Apple and kept running things at a positive profit margin. Their profits went up. A low volume of profitable products is more profitable than any number of unprofitable products. "Apple buys our product" only goes so far, and the "we'll make up in volume" holds no water.
Since when wasn't it a programmer's job to effectively analyse the requirements for what they're writing?
Your nonchalant dismissal of the initial claim is kind of like GM claiming they couldn't have possibly known that an 8-track wasn't a suitable commuter vehicle, and that they couldn't have possibly known that a dog wouldn't be driving the vehicle... ie, if you're writing a program for system that is supposed to perform any particular task (regardless of what that task is!), the BARE FUCKING MINIMUM REQUIREMENT IS THAT IT IS WRITTEN FOR A GIVEN SYSTEM.
Kinda fucking trivial, unless you think that it's reasonable that your program should be randomly terminated by the sysadmin, and for you to receive the blame for it.
Your concern is understandable, but change/revision/risk management in prod does not necessitate that your people do not cross skill. Cross skilled people can often see a problem where the myopic
For instance, train a skilled and headstrong jack-of-all-trades IT person into any sort of "enterprise" IT position and watch how many toes they step on everyone's toes, fixing problems unprovoked in other departments and making fools out of everyone. It happens pretty frequently (and why good sysadmins are not generally well liked in corporate environments).
Yeah, who exactly are you manage? I suspect their resumes will never make it to my desk, so I won't have to worry about it too much, but I am concerned for their well being: they need to be fostered in cross-utility.
The most useless IT employees I've seen are "specialists". They're the "Java specialists" or the "Ruby/web 2.0 experts". They're the "Windows professionals" and what have you - the people who single-skill their way through life, not really bothering to improve themselves beyond the most basic understanding of "specialist" or "expert".
The best IT employees are the ones who can do it all. No, they may not have expertise in all of it, but they're at least knowledgeable in most of it and have one or two areas of preference and excellence (eg. directory services, mail, routing, etc.). Chances are, your 'rockstar' developer or sysadmin is much more versatile than you give him credit for - he or she has just learned to keep their head down for fear of some meddlesome idiot in a different department blaming him for their own mistakes (due to their incompetence and territorial nature). I've seen it time and time again.
Change management and release management (bzzzzt! buzzword alert!) are completely unrelated to the topic at hand. Effective and useful change/release management can still be performed (though I can understand your concern for trying to comply with upper management's concerns of remaining within complete ITIL buzzword compliance, as useless as an actual aim might be). Maybe it is better to just have a 'specialist' in charge of those mundane tasks, allowing the professionals to do their jobs?
Also, if your sysadmins are using production environments as test environments, you either have programmer types (who are incompetent as sysadmins) doing the wrong job and you failed the hiring process, or you've been seriously short changing them on the resources they need to do their jobs (much more likely).
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It would have to be marketed and priced correctly. I'm thinking in the 300-500 dollar price range, with a 20" display of decent resolution, wireless keyboard and mouse, and possibly something akin to a Wii infrared controller. Then they'd basically have to market it like Apple did the iMac all those years ago when it was initially offered.
For maybe $250, if they were to do the same thing but as a dock for Android phones of 4.0 or greater release, I'd buy one.
The Transformer has done much what you say, but to the Netbook market. It's easily 1 out of every 2 "small laptops" I see now. People seem to do OK using it as a full on replacement, and many even prefer it over a Windows 7 machine or a Mac, from what I've seen.
I think you've just made the most ignorant insulting comment I've seen on slashdot. Congratulations.
How is this prejudiced? All of the above stated things happened in roughly a generation of when the respective immigrant groups started setting foot on US soil, often due to societal pressures to do so (in part). Go to any neighborhood in the Bronx or Brooklyn (well, almost) and ask one of them what their cultural identity is - you'll almost invariably get "I'm an American". They identify with the American cultural ethos.
Do the same in, oh, pretty much anywhere in Arizona or southern Texas, where wanton immigration has been occurring for the past 40 years, and you'll probably get "I'm a Latino" or "I'm Mexican".
Yes, they still had their cultural and societal problems. (Hell, you can see - to this day - both the positive and negative marks of immigrant cultures throughout the US, such as both pizza in New York and the Northeast having the biggest problems with alcoholism and collusive government/corporations).
Not to invoke Godwin, but the Nazis invented jet propulsion and quite a few other innocuous things. Arguably, they were quite morally bankrupt.
Yeah I'm guessing this is geared more towards people who do the whole vendor support thing, and they've got a handful (or at least one) person dedicated to maintaining specific equipment (eg. linux servers vs. switches). Homogenous is key, but high thread count will also push ARM advantage here, because you could fit (say) 8 of these small systems with multiple CPUs each in a single 2U without much issue, and still leverage your SAN storage.
You'll probably see them in low-end "server" devices too, I imagine. Eventually. Unless you're running stuff that'll compile and run on ARM, it probably gives you no advantage unless it's worth recompiling/running it on something with a GPU. If Windows 2010 were available for ARM, running a terminal server cluster might be useful, for instance (depending on how big your dept is).
With AMD's experience in x86, if anyone can push ARM to the server/desktop it's them. If they can standardize on things like the 'BIOS' for their own products, I'm sure many smaller companies will follow. (You're already seeing a degree of standardization eg. with integrators like Samsung, but that's now where AMD is going with this, exactly.)
For SMB - say, IT shops with fewer than a dozen identical systems now, or special use cases needing GPU (eg. scientific computing), this is a non-starter, at least for now. Think high flung web shops, cloud computing, and the like.
If AMD can push their engineering into ARM quickly, they might not only stand a chance but they might dominate fairly quickly, I'd think. They're not on par with Intel on die size, but IIRC they're pretty close - that knowledge is certainly applicable.
Remember, they've got good GPUs already. A lot of what they tried to do with the Mobility and later generations were very "ARM-like" already, it just didn't exactly work due to x86 limitations. I'd think they've got a pretty good chance overall. (If anything, it's a big market. Tegra# are really pushing NVidia along, after all...)
The only thing Steam needs a hard drive for is storing cached game data, savegames, and profile data cache.
There's no reason why they couldn't just set up a "SteamOS" LiveCD to mount and troll all attached storage for their Steam cache. It shouldn't matter if it's on NTFS (and thus available from Windows as well) or ext4 or zfs for that matter.
How is this any different than Steam on Windows on a laptop, desktop, or a different desktop? Surprise! Different hardware has different performance characteristics, as do different drivers, etc. - this is an endemic part of PC gaming and always has been.
This is a non-issue and, really, is indicative of not understanding the issue. Hardware here really isn't so much the problem as it is the software. Fortunately, most games today can run on some fairly low-end systems with integrated AMD hardware, or even the newer Intel chips.
A bigger problem would be, I believe, the different distributions and their various versions, security related implementations (SuSE comes to mind), desktop environments, and releases. They can hit a pretty big part of the target by focusing on Ubuntu's LTS and possibly the following .10 release as those same packages will (probably) work on Debian and other similar Debian based distributions, or they could even use alien to create the debs from RPMs to hit Fedora/Redhat/Debian/Ubuntu all at once. Fairly trivial - Oracle/Sun has been doing something similar quite well for years for Virtualbox, for instance.
Overall, I don't think it'll be all that different than the historic issues people have had with different driver or DirectX issues in Windows (still a significant problem IME). The biggest reason Linux hasn't taken off in the past decade at home is because people want iTunes, flash and the like and don't want to have to install an OS. A "gaming platform" would fix things for Valve pretty damn quickly, especially if it could boot up in under 30s and provide all the user's games to him in that timeframe.
So basically, it's the ultimate irony that this guy built a ship for someone like Jobs, who has seemed content doing the same thing to his pretentious customers for the past decade+.
Indeed. This ship looks like something a 3rd grader might draw, or a floating California mansion, take your pick. It's all hard angles with no angular cohesion, and it's as dimensionally awkward as a Picasso painting.
Basically, aside from the white, it's everything an Apple product isn't.
Not all that unusual. We have a circular supercell during the winter out here in the upper Midwest with considerable regularity. "Hurricane force winds" is commonly stated, and not always associated with a circular supercell. It's just common.
Yes, it is 'only' a category one hurricane. That is going to cover ALL of Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and parts of Virginia, Kentucky, West Virginia, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine with at least tropical storm force winds.
So, in other words, it's not that different than the winter storms we regularly get out here in the Montana, Nebraska, North/South Dakota, Minnesota regions of the country where we'll have 2-4 days of gale force winds, blowing ice and/or snow, zero visibility, and 15' drifts at regular intervals? You know, the ones we'll sometimes have 2-3 times a winter.
The only really significant thing about this, IMO, is the storm surge. That's pretty damn bad. It's basically a "New Orleans diagnosis" except there's nothing to be done for it.
(That said, we have some fairly regular flooding out on the prairie, too. Like when the eastern half of the state of Nebraska was flooded just recently here, for most of a year.)
You're about two or three CPU generations and 5? years off there, bubby.
Rome was pretty diverse (after Roman citizenry ceased to have meaning and the Republic became an Empire, shortly before its fall). That was around when Rome started giving food and entertainment to the masses.
By and large, because they aren't allowed in currently?
I know quite a few British people who have in-demand skills and a positive gross net worth who have been denied work vistas (or immigration vistas, or anything else they've applied for) in the past decade. The US does not favor skilled laborers from other modern countries, it only favors moderately capable laborers from 3rd world countries, refugees of questionable dogmatic affiliation, and people who enter the country illegally. It's the only way to sooth our collective cultural white guilt.
Oh, it's not ironic.
My immigrant ancestors assimilated into the culture. Yes, they brought their own culture, but by and large (and in no small part, under the threat of force by the government), they adopted the rules and standards of their new homeland. See: Irishmen becoming educated, Italians starting legitimate businesses, Germans ceasing to be proud Germans (all of which added a very crucial part to the cultural ethics and fabric of the nation).
Travel through San Francisco some time, or any other current immigrant ghetto (there are a lot of them now), and tell me how well you think those people have assimilated into the culture of the US. Sorry, they really haven't.
Yep. They're not able to get a wife here (or there, which is why they're probably here), so there's nothing to allow them to stay.
They go back home, get the wife, and basically use the experience gained here to kickstart the industry they were working in here, but in their own country. The biggest thing H1B does is foster foreign competition and degrade our local pool of experienced people. The US lumber industry is a good example of what happens when you outsource your production costs...
Ok, so that's cool and all. Did you bother thinking?
H1B workers only come into "in-demand" careers in highly competitive fields where large amounts of sensitive data is concerned. You're ignoring crucial things like:
* This diminishes domestic demand for employees, resulting in both fewer people entering the fields and lower wages
* These people are taking jobs in industries with a fraction of that 150 million number. (How big is the IT industry? The biotech industry? Etc.)
* On the lower side of the pay scale, there are illegals taking jobs and driving down the price for cheap labor as well.
We're already at the point in the US where people well into their 20s can look forward to "dorming" well into their 30s with housemates and roommates, and where many are still living at home because of higher costs and minimal opportunity. This is partially their fault (for picking something like an English major in college), but not everyone can be an engineer. God knows even those who are (regardless of race or culture) are rarely up to snuff.
My personal experience with Indian H1B workers is that there are a lot of them. They're upwards of 10%-30% of the IT workers I've seen. Some are very good, exceptional even. Many, if not most, are no better than and not as good as "common" DeVry types. Most of them lack crucial problem solving skills which are a "given" in Western cultures. Now, imagine for a second if there were 10% more jobs in IT oriented fields than there are now, and had been since H1B workers became common place. Would wages be lower? No, they'd probably be higher than they are now by a fair margin, making comparable amounts to other "skilled professional" careers with similar experience - as opposed to markedly less than eg. civil engineers or the like. A crucial point to consider is that there is a very large number of skilled, experienced, and unemployed people in the US right now who are looking for work (or in some cases, have stopped trying) who are "unemployable" because they're too old, too experienced, or two "American" (what with being insistent about only working 40-45 hours a week, or the like).
I wonder if either of the Presidential candidates would dare to say that on their first day of office, they would create 65,000 high-paying, skilled domestic employment opportunities. It could be done fairly trivially, and there are certainly close to that number of Americans looking for work in in-demand fields. So why not hire a 22 year old college grad from the US than a 21 year old Indian with questionable education or experience?
The word you are looking for is in the dictionary. It summarizes your paragraph properly: "propaganda"
Absolutely. My company abides by the same principle: don't put all your eggs in one basket. :) Diversity is key, and making a buyer/seller relationship one-sided is incredibly easy when one side needs the business of the other more than the opposite is true. The best thing a company can do for itself is to try to provide a product which will help their customers not need them any longer as a supplier, and vice versa - the customer will keep coming back because they want your product.
This is, after all, why Intel has been so dependent upon the existence of AMD for the past decade. They really do need each other; without AMD, Intel would have no excuse it could use with its shareholders to not gouge its customers, thus hurting the bottom line (and ultimately the shareholders).
It really doesn't matter if they found someone to buy comparable numbers at a profitable price or if they simply dropped Apple and kept running things at a positive profit margin. Their profits went up. A low volume of profitable products is more profitable than any number of unprofitable products. "Apple buys our product" only goes so far, and the "we'll make up in volume" holds no water.
My best guess, based on years as a net/sys admin and your described systems, is that you've got an Apple branded access point.
Pretty much. "They know UNIX. They can do this."
Since when wasn't it a programmer's job to effectively analyse the requirements for what they're writing?
Your nonchalant dismissal of the initial claim is kind of like GM claiming they couldn't have possibly known that an 8-track wasn't a suitable commuter vehicle, and that they couldn't have possibly known that a dog wouldn't be driving the vehicle... ie, if you're writing a program for system that is supposed to perform any particular task (regardless of what that task is!), the BARE FUCKING MINIMUM REQUIREMENT IS THAT IT IS WRITTEN FOR A GIVEN SYSTEM.
Kinda fucking trivial, unless you think that it's reasonable that your program should be randomly terminated by the sysadmin, and for you to receive the blame for it.
Your concern is understandable, but change/revision/risk management in prod does not necessitate that your people do not cross skill. Cross skilled people can often see a problem where the myopic
For instance, train a skilled and headstrong jack-of-all-trades IT person into any sort of "enterprise" IT position and watch how many toes they step on everyone's toes, fixing problems unprovoked in other departments and making fools out of everyone. It happens pretty frequently (and why good sysadmins are not generally well liked in corporate environments).
Yeah, who exactly are you manage? I suspect their resumes will never make it to my desk, so I won't have to worry about it too much, but I am concerned for their well being: they need to be fostered in cross-utility.
The most useless IT employees I've seen are "specialists". They're the "Java specialists" or the "Ruby/web 2.0 experts". They're the "Windows professionals" and what have you - the people who single-skill their way through life, not really bothering to improve themselves beyond the most basic understanding of "specialist" or "expert".
The best IT employees are the ones who can do it all. No, they may not have expertise in all of it, but they're at least knowledgeable in most of it and have one or two areas of preference and excellence (eg. directory services, mail, routing, etc.). Chances are, your 'rockstar' developer or sysadmin is much more versatile than you give him credit for - he or she has just learned to keep their head down for fear of some meddlesome idiot in a different department blaming him for their own mistakes (due to their incompetence and territorial nature). I've seen it time and time again.
Change management and release management (bzzzzt! buzzword alert!) are completely unrelated to the topic at hand. Effective and useful change/release management can still be performed (though I can understand your concern for trying to comply with upper management's concerns of remaining within complete ITIL buzzword compliance, as useless as an actual aim might be). Maybe it is better to just have a 'specialist' in charge of those mundane tasks, allowing the professionals to do their jobs?
Also, if your sysadmins are using production environments as test environments, you either have programmer types (who are incompetent as sysadmins) doing the wrong job and you failed the hiring process, or you've been seriously short changing them on the resources they need to do their jobs (much more likely).