The amazing thing is that despite the consistently bad press Microsoft is getting about their flagship product that they're steamrolling ahead with it anyway, and more amazingly still, that their stock prices aren't suffering at all (in fact, they've been getting higher all year long).
I'm sorry. I've used everything from fvwm, Windows 3.0, MacOS 7-10, OpenStep, and BeOS to Windows 7, awesome, ratpoison, KDE 1-3, GNOME, WinCE, iPhone, and Android (2.2 - 4). Metro is, by far, the worst graphical interface/window management I have seen, taking partial elements from other concepts and re-implementing them - not only poorly, but horrendously.
Meanwhile, many people were using the W7 previews exclusively, going to length to use them past their expiration dates.
Re:Can't wait to see the rebranded offerings
on
Dell To Acquire Wyse
·
· Score: 1
Dell offered a thinclient a couple years ago, IIRC. It was fairly affordable for the time.
You can find thinclients in the ~$350 ballpark, but that's a bit expensive compared to what's capable with ARM devices now. I imagine you could get them down to $200 and run Android without much problem at all and still have decent quality - their specifications don't need to be that steep, and a Beagleboard spec'd device would more than do the job.
I administered on a network where we used the Wyse terminals as dumb clients to talk to our in-house time (accounting) server. We had about 200 of them, of two different vintages.
We had old Wyse and new Wyse. The old ones ran an in-house rolled BSD, but the new ones were WinCE 4.x or 3.x and we weren't able to flash them with a newer BSD ROM due to the hardware being incompatible.
We ended up buying replacements for the newer model with the old models on Ebay.
I have no idea how their products have performed in the last 7 years, though. With a marketing name like 'cloud client computing', I'd sooner not use them.
Borland, WordPerfect, Lotus and Novell all failed because they did one, maybe two things: they based their business model off the success of another company (Microsoft) which then subsequently ate their lunch by underselling or bundling lesser - but still competing - products until they had market dominance.
There are a LOT of large software companies which did this and got the same bullet to the back. Had they not thrown in whole heartedly with Microsoft but instead put the same effort into other platforms (no, I realize that isn't that easy), things may be different today.
Unfortunately for all of them, Microsoft took a no-holds-barred approach to OEM relationships and beat them outside the realm of merits by flooding the market (and having the home market locked up due to games didn't hurt).
Fortunately for everyone at this point, Microsoft is likely to shoot themselves in the foot with W8 and it's Cloud ventures.
You're throwing those numbers around like they actually matter.
How many people do you know today who have a tablet or smartphone but no computer, or use their computers as an auxiliary device? I know quite a few. Not a majority yet, but then, I work in IT.
The personal computer was always viewed in its early days by many as "electronics as social change". We've had that transformation. The next wave of transformation will be in distributed mobile computing.
I would not be surprised if, by 2015, people don't buy 'desktops' or 'laptops' anymore, at least for the most part. They buy a single device which is primarily a phone, but can dock into any number of 'cradles' and be used as a full 'computer' workstation. My bet is on Asus doing it first.
The courses in college I did best in were the ones I paid other people to take notes for me (or, more accurately, the classes where I paid the attractive girls to take notes for me. It set up the proper dom/sub expectations for later...). Second to that were the courses where I didn't take notes. The exception to this was in courses where my notes could be used for exams.
For reference, notes are most excellent. If you actually want to have a good recollection of the lecture and to engage the lecture, your focus really needs to be on the contents of the lecture, not listening to the specific words spoken in order to transcribe them into notes. The comprehension loss from having to do that conversion is fairly severe.
Granted, brains work differently. My brain copes much better with listening and digesting than it does taking notes and later referencing.
I work at a location where we have regular mathematical lectures on a wide range of topics. Barring user expertise, this is indeed the best option.
We have lectures for a week (so, 2-5 hour long lectures a day) 2-3 times a month. The way 'we' do it is the note takers use their preferred method. This ranges from:
* pen and paper * latex * pen and paper, and then convert it to latex later
All lectures are also recorded (video). Audio quality is, of course, paramount, though video resolution is also important due to the desire to retain the fluidity of the lecture: things like gestures, verbal pacing, overhead (digital and/or analog) slides, and the Q/A associated with a lecture all play into the overall utility of a presentation, so it's useful to retain it all. We also make the notes and slides (usually in PDF format) available as well. Having a "scan PDF to email" scanner is very useful for things like this.
Backup product? Just DFS/SIS using block level dedup on Windows. Perf was a bit of a dog. I don't believe ZFS has similar ratios for the same data (migrated), but the approach is different.
The reputation you want is "do not fuck with us or you will reap the whirlwind."
Physical security takes many forms; the dog, gun, and security cameras all serve various parts of the whole picture.
As for your current situation: you were scouted out and target over a period of days, weeks, or months. You were probably hit by fairly brazen professionals. You will probably not be hit again for a number of reasons:
* you are now more alert due to having been victimized * you are now more likely to be better prepared * they were thorough and you have nothing of value in the house which they wanted. Presumably, it was not a quick snatch and grab due to the safe being gone, too. * you are more likely to alert your neighbors to be alert
Alert your neighbors, if you have any. Having a strong community is the best defense against these things. Our neighborhood has a nosey codger who is quite vigilant about things like this: if someone doesn't look like they're supposed to be there, he confronts them. People home with no vehicles in the drive is usually a pretty good indication if there's no garage.
I would also suggest not leaving unsecured arms in the house if you are not normally home. If they know you're not home and have firearms, you are more likely to be robbed by serious criminals (and then have to deal with all the paperwork, headache, and guilt of stolen firearms). On the other hand, stolen firearms are fairly easy to track unless they're intended for use in other crimes.
The most likely thing is that you won't be violated again in this fashion for some time, though it pays to be vigilant in security of mind. As for the topic at hand: newegg has occasional deals in the under-$500 range (saw an 8 camera unit for about $350 recently) for decent home security systems which do what you request. They use mini-BNC and the like, I believe.
Ironically, the Texas and Southeast US accents are closer to the British English of 200 years ago than today's modern British accents are, supposedly (ie closer to Irish). I heard that the modern Brit accents are more derived from the "royal" accents put on by the betters.
Absolutely. The 'fantasy' denoted is all British-inspired, for that matter.
If you think of swords, fighting, and wizards, people instantly think of Britain, Merlin, and King Arthur to some degree. That's going to hold true for pure fantasy with that kind of setting.
On the other hand, there's some 'fantasy' which does not have the British accent, but does not deal in the arcane, and has a decidedly "American" feel:
* Jericho * Supernatural * Mad Max
Sure, they're a degree of Science Fiction in them, but they're also Fantasy stories. The author of this article was being disingenuous to make an interesting point: of course you're going to have them sound British if it's British-themed archaic fantasy fiction. You wouldn't want them to be speaking German, because then they'd sound like Nazis. You don't cast a "jin" as a British speaker in something like, oh, Sons of Arabia (theoretically speaking), you give him a Persian English accent (or whatever). Likewise, you don't give your killabikers apocalypse bikers a British accent if it takes place in Texas.
It's almost all video, so there's no deduplication or meaningful compression that can be done.
Incorrect. It all depends on what kind of data duplication is being performed. I've witnessed 30%+ dedup reduction with H264 video using block level dedup.
He mis-remembered his "11 9s" marketing figure and added two more: http://aws.amazon.com/s3/faqs/#How_is_Amazon_S3_designed_to_achieve_99.999999999%_durability
On the "If it's powered on it's a copy, not a backup" mantra: I've heard this for years and I can agree with it, somewhat: catastrophic power failure, corruption, etc. means it can be damaged or altered. The same is for security issues.
However, this is true for on-facility tape backup, or remote tape backup, as well. Except with tape, it's more likely to be a "we lost everything" scenario than "a couple files were corrupt" as it is with a hard drive.
So what if you have A Lot Of Data, and you've got a tape robot? that is, for all intents and purpose, online tape backup. You're not removing or storing the tapes while they're in the robot, which is how they're mostly run until they've gone through the cycle.
For archival, I'd agree with you, however. Offline archive data should certainly be offline.
As someone who's been doing this sysadmin thing for the better part of 12 years now, I'd appreciate anyone who has a good explanation for why an online copy of something is not a 'backup'.
How, exactly, does a tape drive actually save you anything (in terms of time spent backing up, throughput, etc.) with a dataset of 12TB over disk-based? I fail to see how that would be any more favorable.
* hard drives are universal. Anything can read a SATA or SAS drive. I can still (fairly easily) find something to hook my Ultra2 SCSI disks into a modern system, and due to filesystems being typically forward compatible, that's not a problem. * With tape, you are bound to the program which backed it up, with the drive which backed it up. tar wins in this department, but that's rarely if ever actually used anymore.
There is a time and a place for tape (oh-shit off-site backup when you haven't got the ability to do off-site replication, and archiving with very large datasets), but that isn't most places.
It's hard to believe people still use Symantec Backup Exec with single-tape drives.
Not only is that business as usual, but what they were teaching isn't necessarily incorrect. They can, and often do, get away with 'bending' the law (and Constitution). The 'cultural advice' is also often correct due to cultural taboos on hand shaking and against non-Muslims.
I also want to add: I'm more likely to buy a game if I don't have to deal with the DRM. I can install it anywhere, just like I can read a book anywhere. Software has enough limitations as it is, I don't need the added restrictions of DRM to restrict my use of the game after a certain poorly defined point.
It's hard enough as it is to get many older games to work properly.
What if this were books? "My favorite book as a child was $book. But, sorry kids. It doesn't exist anymore." Many games have stories which are as highly involving as a book and are, quite arguably, cultural art and highly influential (something like Modern Warfare or Max Payne comes to mind).
This is essentially just because the life sciences are harder than the physical sciences. The life sciences have much more intractable problems with complexity of systems and difficulty in controlling variables.
That's certainly a possible contributing factor. I will grant you that.
Or, quite simply, they're not rigorously exercising the scientific method, as you have to in a more provable field such as hard science. (There's a reason why it's called hard science, you know.) It seems like every other week we read about some study 'proving' some new scientific principle which is plagued with logical and procedural fallacy.
That's why I'm not an environmentalist, by any stretch of the imagination. Neither are most "sportsmen" or other people who actually spend a significant part of their lives outdoors.
They're conservationalists. The general idea is the same, but they're not slack-jawed breathers who occasionally froth at the mouth, they're actually approaching the problem from the reasonable perspective of "let's not make assumptions, embrace what we know, and make only small and potentially reversible changes".
Environmentalists are the ones which introduce predators to environments in the hopes of eliminating an invasive species, which then destroys the environment. Don't be an environmentalist, it's a legacy with many bodies along the road.
Slashdot Mirror
The amazing thing is that despite the consistently bad press Microsoft is getting about their flagship product that they're steamrolling ahead with it anyway, and more amazingly still, that their stock prices aren't suffering at all (in fact, they've been getting higher all year long).
I'm sorry. I've used everything from fvwm, Windows 3.0, MacOS 7-10, OpenStep, and BeOS to Windows 7, awesome, ratpoison, KDE 1-3, GNOME, WinCE, iPhone, and Android (2.2 - 4). Metro is, by far, the worst graphical interface/window management I have seen, taking partial elements from other concepts and re-implementing them - not only poorly, but horrendously.
Meanwhile, many people were using the W7 previews exclusively, going to length to use them past their expiration dates.
Dell offered a thinclient a couple years ago, IIRC. It was fairly affordable for the time.
You can find thinclients in the ~$350 ballpark, but that's a bit expensive compared to what's capable with ARM devices now. I imagine you could get them down to $200 and run Android without much problem at all and still have decent quality - their specifications don't need to be that steep, and a Beagleboard spec'd device would more than do the job.
I administered on a network where we used the Wyse terminals as dumb clients to talk to our in-house time (accounting) server. We had about 200 of them, of two different vintages.
We had old Wyse and new Wyse. The old ones ran an in-house rolled BSD, but the new ones were WinCE 4.x or 3.x and we weren't able to flash them with a newer BSD ROM due to the hardware being incompatible.
We ended up buying replacements for the newer model with the old models on Ebay.
I have no idea how their products have performed in the last 7 years, though. With a marketing name like 'cloud client computing', I'd sooner not use them.
Borland, WordPerfect, Lotus and Novell all failed because they did one, maybe two things: they based their business model off the success of another company (Microsoft) which then subsequently ate their lunch by underselling or bundling lesser - but still competing - products until they had market dominance.
There are a LOT of large software companies which did this and got the same bullet to the back. Had they not thrown in whole heartedly with Microsoft but instead put the same effort into other platforms (no, I realize that isn't that easy), things may be different today.
Unfortunately for all of them, Microsoft took a no-holds-barred approach to OEM relationships and beat them outside the realm of merits by flooding the market (and having the home market locked up due to games didn't hurt).
Fortunately for everyone at this point, Microsoft is likely to shoot themselves in the foot with W8 and it's Cloud ventures.
You're throwing those numbers around like they actually matter.
How many people do you know today who have a tablet or smartphone but no computer, or use their computers as an auxiliary device? I know quite a few. Not a majority yet, but then, I work in IT.
The personal computer was always viewed in its early days by many as "electronics as social change". We've had that transformation. The next wave of transformation will be in distributed mobile computing.
I would not be surprised if, by 2015, people don't buy 'desktops' or 'laptops' anymore, at least for the most part. They buy a single device which is primarily a phone, but can dock into any number of 'cradles' and be used as a full 'computer' workstation. My bet is on Asus doing it first.
Have any links to these things? Your description of utility entices me, but a quick google doesn't yield much for a purchasable product.
Disagree.
The courses in college I did best in were the ones I paid other people to take notes for me (or, more accurately, the classes where I paid the attractive girls to take notes for me. It set up the proper dom/sub expectations for later...). Second to that were the courses where I didn't take notes. The exception to this was in courses where my notes could be used for exams.
For reference, notes are most excellent. If you actually want to have a good recollection of the lecture and to engage the lecture, your focus really needs to be on the contents of the lecture, not listening to the specific words spoken in order to transcribe them into notes. The comprehension loss from having to do that conversion is fairly severe.
Granted, brains work differently. My brain copes much better with listening and digesting than it does taking notes and later referencing.
I work at a location where we have regular mathematical lectures on a wide range of topics. Barring user expertise, this is indeed the best option.
We have lectures for a week (so, 2-5 hour long lectures a day) 2-3 times a month. The way 'we' do it is the note takers use their preferred method. This ranges from:
* pen and paper
* latex
* pen and paper, and then convert it to latex later
All lectures are also recorded (video). Audio quality is, of course, paramount, though video resolution is also important due to the desire to retain the fluidity of the lecture: things like gestures, verbal pacing, overhead (digital and/or analog) slides, and the Q/A associated with a lecture all play into the overall utility of a presentation, so it's useful to retain it all. We also make the notes and slides (usually in PDF format) available as well. Having a "scan PDF to email" scanner is very useful for things like this.
Backup product? Just DFS/SIS using block level dedup on Windows. Perf was a bit of a dog. I don't believe ZFS has similar ratios for the same data (migrated), but the approach is different.
You know that trail cameras are pretty easy to detach and steal, right? Happens all the time.
The reputation you want is "do not fuck with us or you will reap the whirlwind."
Physical security takes many forms; the dog, gun, and security cameras all serve various parts of the whole picture.
As for your current situation: you were scouted out and target over a period of days, weeks, or months. You were probably hit by fairly brazen professionals. You will probably not be hit again for a number of reasons:
* you are now more alert due to having been victimized
* you are now more likely to be better prepared
* they were thorough and you have nothing of value in the house which they wanted. Presumably, it was not a quick snatch and grab due to the safe being gone, too.
* you are more likely to alert your neighbors to be alert
Alert your neighbors, if you have any. Having a strong community is the best defense against these things. Our neighborhood has a nosey codger who is quite vigilant about things like this: if someone doesn't look like they're supposed to be there, he confronts them. People home with no vehicles in the drive is usually a pretty good indication if there's no garage.
I would also suggest not leaving unsecured arms in the house if you are not normally home. If they know you're not home and have firearms, you are more likely to be robbed by serious criminals (and then have to deal with all the paperwork, headache, and guilt of stolen firearms). On the other hand, stolen firearms are fairly easy to track unless they're intended for use in other crimes.
The most likely thing is that you won't be violated again in this fashion for some time, though it pays to be vigilant in security of mind. As for the topic at hand: newegg has occasional deals in the under-$500 range (saw an 8 camera unit for about $350 recently) for decent home security systems which do what you request. They use mini-BNC and the like, I believe.
Ironically, the Texas and Southeast US accents are closer to the British English of 200 years ago than today's modern British accents are, supposedly (ie closer to Irish). I heard that the modern Brit accents are more derived from the "royal" accents put on by the betters.
Absolutely. The 'fantasy' denoted is all British-inspired, for that matter.
If you think of swords, fighting, and wizards, people instantly think of Britain, Merlin, and King Arthur to some degree. That's going to hold true for pure fantasy with that kind of setting.
On the other hand, there's some 'fantasy' which does not have the British accent, but does not deal in the arcane, and has a decidedly "American" feel:
* Jericho
* Supernatural
* Mad Max
Sure, they're a degree of Science Fiction in them, but they're also Fantasy stories. The author of this article was being disingenuous to make an interesting point: of course you're going to have them sound British if it's British-themed archaic fantasy fiction. You wouldn't want them to be speaking German, because then they'd sound like Nazis. You don't cast a "jin" as a British speaker in something like, oh, Sons of Arabia (theoretically speaking), you give him a Persian English accent (or whatever). Likewise, you don't give your killabikers apocalypse bikers a British accent if it takes place in Texas.
It's almost all video, so there's no deduplication or meaningful compression that can be done.
Incorrect. It all depends on what kind of data duplication is being performed. I've witnessed 30%+ dedup reduction with H264 video using block level dedup.
He mis-remembered his "11 9s" marketing figure and added two more: http://aws.amazon.com/s3/faqs/#How_is_Amazon_S3_designed_to_achieve_99.999999999%_durability
On the "If it's powered on it's a copy, not a backup" mantra: I've heard this for years and I can agree with it, somewhat: catastrophic power failure, corruption, etc. means it can be damaged or altered. The same is for security issues.
However, this is true for on-facility tape backup, or remote tape backup, as well. Except with tape, it's more likely to be a "we lost everything" scenario than "a couple files were corrupt" as it is with a hard drive.
So what if you have A Lot Of Data, and you've got a tape robot? that is, for all intents and purpose, online tape backup. You're not removing or storing the tapes while they're in the robot, which is how they're mostly run until they've gone through the cycle.
For archival, I'd agree with you, however. Offline archive data should certainly be offline.
As someone who's been doing this sysadmin thing for the better part of 12 years now, I'd appreciate anyone who has a good explanation for why an online copy of something is not a 'backup'.
How, exactly, does a tape drive actually save you anything (in terms of time spent backing up, throughput, etc.) with a dataset of 12TB over disk-based? I fail to see how that would be any more favorable.
Add to that:
* hard drives are universal. Anything can read a SATA or SAS drive. I can still (fairly easily) find something to hook my Ultra2 SCSI disks into a modern system, and due to filesystems being typically forward compatible, that's not a problem.
* With tape, you are bound to the program which backed it up, with the drive which backed it up. tar wins in this department, but that's rarely if ever actually used anymore.
There is a time and a place for tape (oh-shit off-site backup when you haven't got the ability to do off-site replication, and archiving with very large datasets), but that isn't most places.
It's hard to believe people still use Symantec Backup Exec with single-tape drives.
Not only is that business as usual, but what they were teaching isn't necessarily incorrect. They can, and often do, get away with 'bending' the law (and Constitution). The 'cultural advice' is also often correct due to cultural taboos on hand shaking and against non-Muslims.
I also want to add: I'm more likely to buy a game if I don't have to deal with the DRM. I can install it anywhere, just like I can read a book anywhere. Software has enough limitations as it is, I don't need the added restrictions of DRM to restrict my use of the game after a certain poorly defined point.
What if 1984's publisher was able to put DRM in the book, and did so, at that time?
Sure, you don't need it. But a valuable part of culture would've been unavailable to subsequent generations due to, uh, Orwellian restrictions.
It's hard enough as it is to get many older games to work properly.
What if this were books? "My favorite book as a child was $book. But, sorry kids. It doesn't exist anymore." Many games have stories which are as highly involving as a book and are, quite arguably, cultural art and highly influential (something like Modern Warfare or Max Payne comes to mind).
This is essentially just because the life sciences are harder than the physical sciences. The life sciences have much more intractable problems with complexity of systems and difficulty in controlling variables.
That's certainly a possible contributing factor. I will grant you that.
Or, quite simply, they're not rigorously exercising the scientific method, as you have to in a more provable field such as hard science. (There's a reason why it's called hard science, you know.) It seems like every other week we read about some study 'proving' some new scientific principle which is plagued with logical and procedural fallacy.
If I can supply power to my house with the stream behind my house and a water wheel, why do I give a dam about what some study says?
That's why I'm not an environmentalist, by any stretch of the imagination. Neither are most "sportsmen" or other people who actually spend a significant part of their lives outdoors.
They're conservationalists. The general idea is the same, but they're not slack-jawed breathers who occasionally froth at the mouth, they're actually approaching the problem from the reasonable perspective of "let's not make assumptions, embrace what we know, and make only small and potentially reversible changes".
Environmentalists are the ones which introduce predators to environments in the hopes of eliminating an invasive species, which then destroys the environment. Don't be an environmentalist, it's a legacy with many bodies along the road.