The big deployment problem was getting it into everyone's Windows desktop. That's been done.
That wasn't the big deployment problem. That was one of them. There are others that are yet to be addressed, and will likely never be:
* IPv6 is not truly backward compatible. Older devices can not address IPv6 address space without an outright stack replacement or half-assed bridging technologies. * There are still many, many products out there being sold today, to the commercial and private sectors, which do not work with IPv6. Many of these cost tens of thousands of dollars and will not be gotten rid of any time soon. * There are many, many software packages which "support IPv6" but which do so poorly. * Of the systems which do support IPv6, many do not work consistently - eg. having IPv6 causes odd routing issues (see: Windows) which pop up when talking to non-IPv6 hosts and networks, resulting in IPv6 needing to be disabled for immediate reasons. * Cost. That's a big one. You can't just "get rid of" legacy IP systems which don't work when there's no alternative. IP systems have been around long enough now that they've got some of the same historic requirements that server software has (eg. people using 20-year-old accounting products). You can't ignore that. * The knowledge gap. This is a big one: the only people who "know" and "understand" IPv6 and don't dislike it are the people with vendor-approved letters after their name. Many of them dislike it as well. You simply can't move to a system which nobody understands intimately and expect willing adoption.
The fact is, any organizational stack migration (of private subnets) to IPv6 would need to be done in one fell swoop for the sake of consistency. This is time consuming, costly, and in many cases not even possible. (Honestly, virtualization is actually working against IPv6 - old IPv4 servers which will never support IPv6 aren't being migrated from, they're being migrated to VMs to live on forever as the undead.)
You're right. But my family of 5 shares a single public address. At work, everyone in my office shares a single public address (well, two for redundancy).
Eh. I don't buy that. Currently, many ISPs reserve 2-5 public addresses per customer, even if the customer isn't using them. We'll just see the start of leaner IP allocation, and stop offering the existing address space for the same prices.
Single-IP will remain the same price (or similar) and additional address space will increase in cost.
IPv6 is a good example of a fix to an existing problem which adds more problems in the meantime.
It's like an application bug/security fix which adds a new user interface, which is entirely different than the original, exports different functionality, and has a massive learning curve. If a vendor were to release something like this, they'd be laughed at and ridiculed until they released a proper 'fix' which didn't break functionality and usability.
Whatever the fix may be, it needs to be backward compatible - and by backward compatible, I mean older devices with IPv4 stacks need to be able to talk to IPv6-only address space. "Running two competing and partially compliant network stacks for compatibility" is about as stupid and complicating as having to reboot to use different applications in another OS: sure, it's one possible solution, but it is by no means ideal or preferred.
People - like the the writers of the wikipedia IPv6 article - fail to grasp the scope of IPv6 compatibility issues with statements like "IPv6 compatibility is mainly a software/firmware issue like the year-2000." No; no it is not like the Year 2000 bugs: those were present in only a handful of currently-used systems, had massive financial backing (due to most of them occurring in big-money industries), and did not impact common system operation unless year-2000 compliance was strictly required by the applications (most did not).
Today, most applications are "Internet aware". There are tens of thousands of different vendored applications and hardware device variants out there which are IPv4 only. The consumer - never mind business - cost would we HUGE.
Look, it's not like the internet would stop working when IPv4 exhaustion occurs. We're not even talking about tenacious limited supply like Peak Oil or Lithium. There are ways to free up years worth of IPv4 address space, and beyond that, there are further ways to reduce address space use - ways which are actually fairly congruent with good network administration practices.
While NAT may have been conceived as a fix to a routing problem, there's a reason we've got non-routed address space; the same applies to why it's a good idea to have as few exposed services on an interface/IP/network. Resorting to NAT for a lot of uses, where it is currently not used, would be a good step (UCal and Berkley, we're looking at you and your friends.)
Maybe. There's also the possibility that the comic had good sales simply because it was placed on 4chan, and not because he intervened. Isn't that the prevailing slashdot argument - that piracy leads to increased sales in general?
As someone who normally reads every word, regardless of the content, I'd be really interested in seeing the results of a study adjusted for this. Take two groups: one composed of individuals who skim as a matter of habit, and the other which habitually reads "slowly" - ie, they do read every word, with regularity.
Yes, reading every word is slower, but if reading the text is a worthwhile venture to begin with, you might as well read the whole thing. This goes for novels and technical (IT, historic, etc.) books. That's my reasoning, anyway.
That said, if I'm used to reading a certain font, I can see how a different one would result in me examining what I'm reading more carefully, as well as the 'regular' font getting skimmed subconsciously (eg. overlooking words such as 'the' and 'is').
Corporate types hate uncertainty and Apple fails to realize this it seems.
What? Why on earth would 'corporate types' care about Apple products?
* Apple has no central domain management tools for OSX * There is no equivalent to AD/machine management for workstations. * There is no OS X server. * Software update controls are limited, to best. * There is no ability to use a local SUS - equivalent or similar to what's available on Linux and Windows. * Office for Mac has no sync with the PC versions, so it'd be an all-or-nothing migration.
I seem to recall reading that Microsoft's JVM actually ended up becoming the JVM for all of.NET after Sun decided to not play nicely, and Microsoft wanted more control.
Actually Oracle doesn't care about Mac platform, it cares about its money making business - databases, ERP software etc. and what percentage of that runs on any Mac server exactly?
0%. And if there actually is an Oracle product marketed/sold for the Mac, that percentage remains constant: MacOS database performance (context switching, SMP, etc.) is so abysmal compared to Windows, Linux, or Solaris, it's not even worth it.
Here's where my paranoia kicks in. I think Apple only hates cross-platform stuff when one of those platforms is Linux.
That's nonsense. I'd say the opposite is true, if anything.
If I can think of one thing which Apple has benefited from Linux, it's the early adopting geeks. Many, many Linux types were early iPod adopters. Many more were early OSX adopters, and still many more have stayed that route. Roughly 1/2 to 1/3 of the "Linux" or "BSD" guys I know area also Apple snobs now.
Now, I can see an argument for disliking Linux on the basis of Apple's BSD-based kernel. Linux has taken some interest away from the BSDs, to be sure. As a result, their kernels don't scale as well, have quite poor context switching, and a myriad of other faults - faults with Apple has inherited, to a large degree. If Apple were able to stomp out Linux a bit, BSD might gain more traction... in which case they'd get more attention to their aged kernel. This would only be a good thing for them - though, of course, it's conspiracy and has no supporting facts or suggestions.:)
I don't know about that. I suspect we'll see a lot of projects simply not using Java anymore.
I'm not saying Java will die (it's too useful for that), but any new project will likely try to steer clear of Java for the time being due to the legal turmoil.
Bigger projects will start to suffer due to the limited availability of developers, and new/young developers will shy from it due to litigation. "Which language should I learn?" will probably not be answered with "Java" as frequently in the past.
That said, Oracle/Sun's JVM isn't the only one out there.
It's too bad; Macs really caught on at my workplace since OS-X was released.
You're right; That really is too bad. You're paying significantly more for your desktop hardware than you should be. I, for one, would be somewhat agitated as one of your coworkers, unless you're paying for that hardware yourself: why does it make sense for the company to pay $6k for yoru machine and only pay a fraction of that for mine?
* Two 2.4GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon “Westmere” (8 cores) * 8GB (4X2GB) * 1TB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s hard drive * Two ATI Radeon HD 5770 1GB * One 18x SuperDrive * Two Apple LED Cinema Display (27" flat panel) * Apple Magic Mouse * Apple Keyboard with Numeric Keypad (English) & User's Guide
Ruling out that the only novel or interesting component on that list is their keyboard, your Apple Store price is a one-time-only low $5,897.00. What the fuck? The same "PC" would be thousands less (this has been shown repeatedly to hold true on various price/comparison reviews through HP, Dell, and part sourcing such as through NewEgg). You're screwing your employer.
Not only that, but I pitty the poor bastard who has to approve patches for installation. Instead of being able to do it centrally, he's got to go to each of your machines to do so. Sounds like a nightmare.
I wonder what all these Citrix XenServer and bare-metal HyperV installations I'm seeing are, then. Unlike VMWare, they're both a better fit for many environments:
* Better, broader hardware support * Easier administration for basic tasks (tit for tat) * Data migration and storage is easier to manage * Both are free
In terms of "interesting software/hardware stack implementation possibilities", Microsoft and Citrix seem to be beating out VMWare at this point. It's seemingly easier to manage a 4-tier thinclient/terminal server/VM host/storage server arrangement with Citrix products than it is VMWare, at least. The stack is more complete.
If my son described doing this stunt, I'd chew his ass for it but good. My dad would do the same to me, I'm sure.
You must be a shitty parent, a liberal, or someone who's balls never dropped. I can't imagine someone chewing out their child for doing something risky but heroic.
Now, I might - might- admonish my child, briefly, for doing something so risky. But it'd be mixed with relief that they're OK, and quickly followed by me saying how proud I was of them - for doing the right thing and helping others in their moment of need.
You've got two options: to live - and die - well, or to live poorly, with a boorish obituary. Living well takes many forms, but usually it involves:
* making a great achievement * doing something for others * being something to someone * sacrifice, perseverance, and disappointment
"Doing something for myself" doesn't factor in too well to that picture. Nobody ever climbed a mountain without getting a couple blisters.
But such is the way with open source. Dump a working solution in favor of an up and coming newbie with its own set of problems.
Commercial software does the same thing, too, but usually it's vendor leapfrog.
Dump Wordperfect for Lotus. Dump Lotus for MS Office. Dump Office for OpenOffice.
Dump Debian for Gentoo. Gentoo for RedHat. and so on...
And how many times have you seen "feature x has been phased out in version y of our product, please migrate/modify your data"? So much fun to build your business case around a software feature, only to find out that everyone drops it at the same time.
No, they're not little ones, but they are his children. I can understand why the parent poster would be hugely against heroism in such a situation.
Being a parent is not easy, quick, or cheap. Adult children are a huge investment, and failed children an even bigger disappointment (so I've heard). Getting them to 18 without major damage, intact relationships, and success on the horizon can be challenging.
You spend 18-25 years (or so) raising 2-4 children - longer than two careers these days. You spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and tens of thousands of hours (or more, if you home school) teaching them, leading them, encouraging them... it's difficult to do well, and even harder to do your best. Unless they die prematurely, you will have them as a reminder of your life's successes and failures for the rest of your days. If they die prematurely, you will always wonder if you could have done more.
These are things people who are not parents do not tend to realize. They see kids solely as a responsibility and a burden, not for what they are to an individual's future.
No, they're not fragile little snowflakes. They're people. But at the same time, they're your people. I imagine that, to a military man, the family organization is much like that of a military unit, so I can understand why he did what he did - I'd be curious to hear how his kids felt about it.
Considering the risks inherent to daily life, it may have not been that much of an actual risk. Hell, the guy could have side-swiped them or hit them in passing at the intersection anyway - in which case the damage done would have been much, much worse, with a higher risk of life-loss.
* join the military for valorous reasons * join civil service (police, fire) for valorous reasons * carry concealed weapons for valorous reasons * take CPR for valorous reasons * intervene when necessary, for all the right reasons
Not all of us are sheep. In fact, the lawyer cladding of our society only makes some of us more likely to respond appropriately.
Society may have been destroyed to the point of implosion by lawyers and politicians, but there are still real people out there, with their balls and souls intact, who will do what is right.
I know someone who tried this same 'stunt'. It did not turn out well.
He was driving on the interstate when a vehicle (approaching) behind him started to drift and swerve. He was in his F250 with family and kids, and there were several smaller vehicles ahead and parallel to him. The other vehicle was a work cargo van.
He pulled in front of the van, and attempted to do this same thing. The problem was that the other guy was accelerating, and still swerving. Right before hitting the rear bumper, the van driver swerved over and back, catching the rear end of the truck with the front of the van. The van skit 45 degrees and then rolled, and my friend's pickup "almost" rolled - he was able to control the truck, up until the minivan rolled into him during the sidways slide, and pushed him over.
The van driver died (before the crash, actually - a stroke), and his wife needed facial reconstruction. His truck was totaled. He and his son were mostly OK (he got a nice scar from it and a broken arm). Thankfully, it could've been much worse, since the other vehicles in front of their's were all smaller (with at least two of them with families), and had any of them collided, the families would have certainly been killed.
Things turned out very well for the people in this story. High-speed vehicle collisions are no joking mater - speed and velocity estimation is tricky, and potential energy at those speeds is so very much more.
I was actually kind of thinking of more of a Serenity/Firefly, BSG, or Wing Commander type situation. They're more in line with human nature than Star Trek, which is quite fantastical regarding human nature - to the point of ruining the shows for me (to the exception of Voyager and DS9).
Why should we have to expend money and energy to climb this cliff, to get stuff that we can easier get down here?
I suppose it's a worldview thing.
I don't know where you're from, but America was founded by people who sought opportunity, freedom, and adventure. Short of joining the military or doing deep-sea exploration, there isn't much of those left in the world - at least not in an open-ended fashion.
So going to space would be an adventure. I probably wouldn't be doing it unless it became feasible for colonization purposes in the next 5-10 years - I'm too old and have responsibilities to family. But I could at least live vicariously through the efforts of others, and the dream that there's something bigger - new, exciting, and fresh - for my children and grandchildren would be a real thrill.
Factor in the cost of going to the moon, mining it and transporting it back to Earth, it is probably more economical to extract gold from sea water.
Maybe. Probably. Who cares? Mining gold on the moon would not be the goal - it would be a financial offset to get to financial profitability.
How many asteroids are there out there containing precious metals, ores, and what have you? Quite a few, I'm sure. Wouldn't it be nice to have zero industrial destruction of the Earth itself? Idealist and somewhat unrealistic, I'm sure - but if enough advancements were made out of necessity, we'd be well on our way to meeting that goal partially. (As they say, necessity is the mother of invention. There's only so much pen and paper groundwork you can do for something you've got no experience doing in the first place.)
As someone who works in IT today, I'm tempted to tell my children the same thing - that programming and computers is a dead end - but for different reasons. Today, it's that the job competition is so stiff, and the pay is not commensurate with the responsibility, experience, knowledge and stress.
On the other hand, what else is there for a technically inclined youth? Electrician?
I don't suppose one of you hardware/math geeks could explain to the hordes of lowly IT/storage/server guys what this actually means to us, pragmatically?
I can't even tell at which 'level' this speed-up would occur. Software support/implementation for SSDs? SSD controllers? What are the practical implications?
You're not getting gold off the moon unless you have heavy industry on the Moon, and putting that sort of investment there would be a monumentally stupefying waste when there are trillions of other things we can invest in down here on the surface and get much better returns much sooner.
True - but long-term, it's quite fascinating. It means there are at least some of the requisite resources on the moon for us to colonize it - for any number of definitions of "colony".
At the very least, there's water - a big cost for short-term missions. If there's water and "soil", you can create a cultivatable environment (if on a small scale). Get a small nuclear reactor up there and autonomous building drones (battery/nuclear powered, of course), and you've got an "unlimited" supply of water and hydrogen which could be used as a longer-term fuel source.
Such developments would almost immediately improve things here on earth, too: if you've got a portable, small ore refinery for moon use, you can use it for terrestrial industry, too (for those small-return, hard-to-reach locations).
Before long, you'd have enough materials and/or infrastructure on the moon that you could consider a permanent human settlement. This could be used for a number of things:
* Increased industrialization. With a little more research, we'd be able to package up the results and space-drop them to Earth. * Increased research opportunities in low-gravity environments (good for long-term space development) * A permanent low-gravity base from which spaceships could be more easily and potentially more cheaply built and launched. A 'space elevator' from the moon to a nearby colony vessel, for instance, would have significantly fewer requirements than one from Earth (strength and distance due to gravity well strength and size). * Deep space telescopes (because building a large 'permanent' telescope in a gravity well would be easier than doing so in space/for space, as would its maintenance).
You minimize it, but "small" monumental jumps have had a very big impact, historically. * Winged flight? Who needs it when we've got rail! * Motor cars? What silly contraptions! * Trains, for passengers? Ridiculous, nobody needs to go that fast! * Go to the moon? What benefit is that? (Electronics industry revolution)
Also, imagine the opportunity for jump-starting another technological revolution. Due to the nature of space, this one, would, I suspect, be largely focused on 'reduce, reuse, recycle' as a core basis of functionality, not a dogma). Imagine: a small portable device which could take any waste petrol (eg. a processed food wrapper, or a great many of them) and turn it into a new, useful item. We're probably pretty close to being able to do that today, just not at an economy of scale. If there were a marketing push or something similar (say, the novelty brought on by 'astronauts are doing it'), such a thing - or something similar - could catch on.
Additionally, change in venue or requirements has often resulted in some interesting/novel/revolutionary improvements: * Westerners improved their garments by observing the natives. * New breeds of cattle were developed for use out West * Canned goods were essentially 'invented' for Napoleon's large armies * Larger, faster, more stable ships were invented to deal with the increased requirements of increased trans-Atlantic transit.
Just think how many 'common day' things we use today, on a daily basis, because someone decided the tool they were using did not work well within their specific constraints (but ended up being broadly applicable elsewhere, too): * carbiner clips * multitools/swiss army knives * PDAs (and now, smartphones) * post-it notes
I'm sure you can think of more. Those are the opportunities that further space exploration present.
I'm sure that, if there is a financial interest in doing so, someone will figure out how to get to the moon and stay there on a semi-permanent basis - if there's a financial case for doing so.
Slashdot Mirror
The big deployment problem was getting it into everyone's Windows desktop. That's been done.
That wasn't the big deployment problem. That was one of them. There are others that are yet to be addressed, and will likely never be:
* IPv6 is not truly backward compatible. Older devices can not address IPv6 address space without an outright stack replacement or half-assed bridging technologies.
* There are still many, many products out there being sold today, to the commercial and private sectors, which do not work with IPv6. Many of these cost tens of thousands of dollars and will not be gotten rid of any time soon.
* There are many, many software packages which "support IPv6" but which do so poorly.
* Of the systems which do support IPv6, many do not work consistently - eg. having IPv6 causes odd routing issues (see: Windows) which pop up when talking to non-IPv6 hosts and networks, resulting in IPv6 needing to be disabled for immediate reasons.
* Cost. That's a big one. You can't just "get rid of" legacy IP systems which don't work when there's no alternative. IP systems have been around long enough now that they've got some of the same historic requirements that server software has (eg. people using 20-year-old accounting products). You can't ignore that.
* The knowledge gap. This is a big one: the only people who "know" and "understand" IPv6 and don't dislike it are the people with vendor-approved letters after their name. Many of them dislike it as well. You simply can't move to a system which nobody understands intimately and expect willing adoption.
The fact is, any organizational stack migration (of private subnets) to IPv6 would need to be done in one fell swoop for the sake of consistency. This is time consuming, costly, and in many cases not even possible. (Honestly, virtualization is actually working against IPv6 - old IPv4 servers which will never support IPv6 aren't being migrated from, they're being migrated to VMs to live on forever as the undead.)
You're right. But my family of 5 shares a single public address. At work, everyone in my office shares a single public address (well, two for redundancy).
This isn't a problem.
Eh. I don't buy that. Currently, many ISPs reserve 2-5 public addresses per customer, even if the customer isn't using them. We'll just see the start of leaner IP allocation, and stop offering the existing address space for the same prices.
Single-IP will remain the same price (or similar) and additional address space will increase in cost.
Yet if he'd used the same features and made it 128 or 256 bit, we'd have been able to add those extra features more transparently to begin with.
IPv6 is a good example of a fix to an existing problem which adds more problems in the meantime.
It's like an application bug/security fix which adds a new user interface, which is entirely different than the original, exports different functionality, and has a massive learning curve. If a vendor were to release something like this, they'd be laughed at and ridiculed until they released a proper 'fix' which didn't break functionality and usability.
Whatever the fix may be, it needs to be backward compatible - and by backward compatible, I mean older devices with IPv4 stacks need to be able to talk to IPv6-only address space. "Running two competing and partially compliant network stacks for compatibility" is about as stupid and complicating as having to reboot to use different applications in another OS: sure, it's one possible solution, but it is by no means ideal or preferred.
People - like the the writers of the wikipedia IPv6 article - fail to grasp the scope of IPv6 compatibility issues with statements like "IPv6 compatibility is mainly a software/firmware issue like the year-2000." No; no it is not like the Year 2000 bugs: those were present in only a handful of currently-used systems, had massive financial backing (due to most of them occurring in big-money industries), and did not impact common system operation unless year-2000 compliance was strictly required by the applications (most did not).
Today, most applications are "Internet aware". There are tens of thousands of different vendored applications and hardware device variants out there which are IPv4 only. The consumer - never mind business - cost would we HUGE.
Look, it's not like the internet would stop working when IPv4 exhaustion occurs. We're not even talking about tenacious limited supply like Peak Oil or Lithium. There are ways to free up years worth of IPv4 address space, and beyond that, there are further ways to reduce address space use - ways which are actually fairly congruent with good network administration practices.
While NAT may have been conceived as a fix to a routing problem, there's a reason we've got non-routed address space; the same applies to why it's a good idea to have as few exposed services on an interface/IP/network. Resorting to NAT for a lot of uses, where it is currently not used, would be a good step (UCal and Berkley, we're looking at you and your friends.)
Maybe. There's also the possibility that the comic had good sales simply because it was placed on 4chan, and not because he intervened. Isn't that the prevailing slashdot argument - that piracy leads to increased sales in general?
A very good point.
As someone who normally reads every word, regardless of the content, I'd be really interested in seeing the results of a study adjusted for this. Take two groups: one composed of individuals who skim as a matter of habit, and the other which habitually reads "slowly" - ie, they do read every word, with regularity.
Yes, reading every word is slower, but if reading the text is a worthwhile venture to begin with, you might as well read the whole thing. This goes for novels and technical (IT, historic, etc.) books. That's my reasoning, anyway.
That said, if I'm used to reading a certain font, I can see how a different one would result in me examining what I'm reading more carefully, as well as the 'regular' font getting skimmed subconsciously (eg. overlooking words such as 'the' and 'is').
Corporate types hate uncertainty and Apple fails to realize this it seems.
What? Why on earth would 'corporate types' care about Apple products?
* Apple has no central domain management tools for OSX
* There is no equivalent to AD/machine management for workstations.
* There is no OS X server.
* Software update controls are limited, to best.
* There is no ability to use a local SUS - equivalent or similar to what's available on Linux and Windows.
* Office for Mac has no sync with the PC versions, so it'd be an all-or-nothing migration.
I seem to recall reading that Microsoft's JVM actually ended up becoming the JVM for all of .NET after Sun decided to not play nicely, and Microsoft wanted more control.
THAT was probably quite the surprise to Sun, too.
Actually Oracle doesn't care about Mac platform, it cares about its money making business - databases, ERP software etc. and what percentage of that runs on any Mac server exactly?
0%. And if there actually is an Oracle product marketed/sold for the Mac, that percentage remains constant: MacOS database performance (context switching, SMP, etc.) is so abysmal compared to Windows, Linux, or Solaris, it's not even worth it.
Here's where my paranoia kicks in. I think Apple only hates cross-platform stuff when one of those platforms is Linux.
That's nonsense. I'd say the opposite is true, if anything.
If I can think of one thing which Apple has benefited from Linux, it's the early adopting geeks. Many, many Linux types were early iPod adopters. Many more were early OSX adopters, and still many more have stayed that route. Roughly 1/2 to 1/3 of the "Linux" or "BSD" guys I know area also Apple snobs now.
Now, I can see an argument for disliking Linux on the basis of Apple's BSD-based kernel. Linux has taken some interest away from the BSDs, to be sure. As a result, their kernels don't scale as well, have quite poor context switching, and a myriad of other faults - faults with Apple has inherited, to a large degree. If Apple were able to stomp out Linux a bit, BSD might gain more traction... in which case they'd get more attention to their aged kernel. This would only be a good thing for them - though, of course, it's conspiracy and has no supporting facts or suggestions. :)
I don't know about that. I suspect we'll see a lot of projects simply not using Java anymore.
I'm not saying Java will die (it's too useful for that), but any new project will likely try to steer clear of Java for the time being due to the legal turmoil.
Bigger projects will start to suffer due to the limited availability of developers, and new/young developers will shy from it due to litigation. "Which language should I learn?" will probably not be answered with "Java" as frequently in the past.
That said, Oracle/Sun's JVM isn't the only one out there.
It's too bad; Macs really caught on at my workplace since OS-X was released.
You're right; That really is too bad. You're paying significantly more for your desktop hardware than you should be. I, for one, would be somewhat agitated as one of your coworkers, unless you're paying for that hardware yourself: why does it make sense for the company to pay $6k for yoru machine and only pay a fraction of that for mine?
* Two 2.4GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon “Westmere” (8 cores)
* 8GB (4X2GB)
* 1TB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s hard drive
* Two ATI Radeon HD 5770 1GB
* One 18x SuperDrive
* Two Apple LED Cinema Display (27" flat panel)
* Apple Magic Mouse
* Apple Keyboard with Numeric Keypad (English) & User's Guide
Ruling out that the only novel or interesting component on that list is their keyboard, your Apple Store price is a one-time-only low $5,897.00. What the fuck? The same "PC" would be thousands less (this has been shown repeatedly to hold true on various price/comparison reviews through HP, Dell, and part sourcing such as through NewEgg). You're screwing your employer.
Not only that, but I pitty the poor bastard who has to approve patches for installation. Instead of being able to do it centrally, he's got to go to each of your machines to do so. Sounds like a nightmare.
VMWare is king at the moment? Really?
I wonder what all these Citrix XenServer and bare-metal HyperV installations I'm seeing are, then. Unlike VMWare, they're both a better fit for many environments:
* Better, broader hardware support
* Easier administration for basic tasks (tit for tat)
* Data migration and storage is easier to manage
* Both are free
In terms of "interesting software/hardware stack implementation possibilities", Microsoft and Citrix seem to be beating out VMWare at this point. It's seemingly easier to manage a 4-tier thinclient/terminal server/VM host/storage server arrangement with Citrix products than it is VMWare, at least. The stack is more complete.
If my son described doing this stunt, I'd chew his ass for it but good. My dad would do the same to me, I'm sure.
You must be a shitty parent, a liberal, or someone who's balls never dropped. I can't imagine someone chewing out their child for doing something risky but heroic.
Now, I might - might- admonish my child, briefly, for doing something so risky. But it'd be mixed with relief that they're OK, and quickly followed by me saying how proud I was of them - for doing the right thing and helping others in their moment of need.
You've got two options: to live - and die - well, or to live poorly, with a boorish obituary. Living well takes many forms, but usually it involves:
* making a great achievement
* doing something for others
* being something to someone
* sacrifice, perseverance, and disappointment
"Doing something for myself" doesn't factor in too well to that picture. Nobody ever climbed a mountain without getting a couple blisters.
But such is the way with open source. Dump a working solution in favor of an up and coming newbie with its own set of problems.
Commercial software does the same thing, too, but usually it's vendor leapfrog.
Dump Wordperfect for Lotus. Dump Lotus for MS Office. Dump Office for OpenOffice.
Dump Debian for Gentoo. Gentoo for RedHat. and so on...
And how many times have you seen "feature x has been phased out in version y of our product, please migrate/modify your data"? So much fun to build your business case around a software feature, only to find out that everyone drops it at the same time.
No, they're not little ones, but they are his children. I can understand why the parent poster would be hugely against heroism in such a situation.
Being a parent is not easy, quick, or cheap. Adult children are a huge investment, and failed children an even bigger disappointment (so I've heard). Getting them to 18 without major damage, intact relationships, and success on the horizon can be challenging.
You spend 18-25 years (or so) raising 2-4 children - longer than two careers these days. You spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and tens of thousands of hours (or more, if you home school) teaching them, leading them, encouraging them... it's difficult to do well, and even harder to do your best. Unless they die prematurely, you will have them as a reminder of your life's successes and failures for the rest of your days. If they die prematurely, you will always wonder if you could have done more.
These are things people who are not parents do not tend to realize. They see kids solely as a responsibility and a burden, not for what they are to an individual's future.
No, they're not fragile little snowflakes. They're people. But at the same time, they're your people. I imagine that, to a military man, the family organization is much like that of a military unit, so I can understand why he did what he did - I'd be curious to hear how his kids felt about it.
Considering the risks inherent to daily life, it may have not been that much of an actual risk. Hell, the guy could have side-swiped them or hit them in passing at the intersection anyway - in which case the damage done would have been much, much worse, with a higher risk of life-loss.
100% - absolutely!
Living has it's virtues, I suppose; dying well has valor. Living without risk is boring.
Fortunately, there are still people who:
* join the military for valorous reasons
* join civil service (police, fire) for valorous reasons
* carry concealed weapons for valorous reasons
* take CPR for valorous reasons
* intervene when necessary, for all the right reasons
Not all of us are sheep. In fact, the lawyer cladding of our society only makes some of us more likely to respond appropriately.
Society may have been destroyed to the point of implosion by lawyers and politicians, but there are still real people out there, with their balls and souls intact, who will do what is right.
I know someone who tried this same 'stunt'. It did not turn out well.
He was driving on the interstate when a vehicle (approaching) behind him started to drift and swerve. He was in his F250 with family and kids, and there were several smaller vehicles ahead and parallel to him. The other vehicle was a work cargo van.
He pulled in front of the van, and attempted to do this same thing. The problem was that the other guy was accelerating, and still swerving. Right before hitting the rear bumper, the van driver swerved over and back, catching the rear end of the truck with the front of the van. The van skit 45 degrees and then rolled, and my friend's pickup "almost" rolled - he was able to control the truck, up until the minivan rolled into him during the sidways slide, and pushed him over.
The van driver died (before the crash, actually - a stroke), and his wife needed facial reconstruction. His truck was totaled. He and his son were mostly OK (he got a nice scar from it and a broken arm). Thankfully, it could've been much worse, since the other vehicles in front of their's were all smaller (with at least two of them with families), and had any of them collided, the families would have certainly been killed.
Things turned out very well for the people in this story. High-speed vehicle collisions are no joking mater - speed and velocity estimation is tricky, and potential energy at those speeds is so very much more.
I was actually kind of thinking of more of a Serenity/Firefly, BSG, or Wing Commander type situation. They're more in line with human nature than Star Trek, which is quite fantastical regarding human nature - to the point of ruining the shows for me (to the exception of Voyager and DS9).
Why should we have to expend money and energy to climb this cliff, to get stuff that we can easier get down here?
I suppose it's a worldview thing.
I don't know where you're from, but America was founded by people who sought opportunity, freedom, and adventure. Short of joining the military or doing deep-sea exploration, there isn't much of those left in the world - at least not in an open-ended fashion.
So going to space would be an adventure. I probably wouldn't be doing it unless it became feasible for colonization purposes in the next 5-10 years - I'm too old and have responsibilities to family. But I could at least live vicariously through the efforts of others, and the dream that there's something bigger - new, exciting, and fresh - for my children and grandchildren would be a real thrill.
Factor in the cost of going to the moon, mining it and transporting it back to Earth, it is probably more economical to extract gold from sea water.
Maybe. Probably. Who cares? Mining gold on the moon would not be the goal - it would be a financial offset to get to financial profitability.
How many asteroids are there out there containing precious metals, ores, and what have you? Quite a few, I'm sure. Wouldn't it be nice to have zero industrial destruction of the Earth itself? Idealist and somewhat unrealistic, I'm sure - but if enough advancements were made out of necessity, we'd be well on our way to meeting that goal partially. (As they say, necessity is the mother of invention. There's only so much pen and paper groundwork you can do for something you've got no experience doing in the first place.)
Yeah, what a perception change, eh?
As someone who works in IT today, I'm tempted to tell my children the same thing - that programming and computers is a dead end - but for different reasons. Today, it's that the job competition is so stiff, and the pay is not commensurate with the responsibility, experience, knowledge and stress.
On the other hand, what else is there for a technically inclined youth? Electrician?
As a proportion of their employee total, I'd suspect it's actually shrunk a bit. Microsoft wasn't exactly a litigation-free company back then.
I don't suppose one of you hardware/math geeks could explain to the hordes of lowly IT/storage/server guys what this actually means to us, pragmatically?
I can't even tell at which 'level' this speed-up would occur. Software support/implementation for SSDs? SSD controllers? What are the practical implications?
You're not getting gold off the moon unless you have heavy industry on the Moon, and putting that sort of investment there would be a monumentally stupefying waste when there are trillions of other things we can invest in down here on the surface and get much better returns much sooner.
True - but long-term, it's quite fascinating. It means there are at least some of the requisite resources on the moon for us to colonize it - for any number of definitions of "colony".
At the very least, there's water - a big cost for short-term missions. If there's water and "soil", you can create a cultivatable environment (if on a small scale). Get a small nuclear reactor up there and autonomous building drones (battery/nuclear powered, of course), and you've got an "unlimited" supply of water and hydrogen which could be used as a longer-term fuel source.
Such developments would almost immediately improve things here on earth, too: if you've got a portable, small ore refinery for moon use, you can use it for terrestrial industry, too (for those small-return, hard-to-reach locations).
Before long, you'd have enough materials and/or infrastructure on the moon that you could consider a permanent human settlement. This could be used for a number of things:
* Increased industrialization. With a little more research, we'd be able to package up the results and space-drop them to Earth.
* Increased research opportunities in low-gravity environments (good for long-term space development)
* A permanent low-gravity base from which spaceships could be more easily and potentially more cheaply built and launched. A 'space elevator' from the moon to a nearby colony vessel, for instance, would have significantly fewer requirements than one from Earth (strength and distance due to gravity well strength and size).
* Deep space telescopes (because building a large 'permanent' telescope in a gravity well would be easier than doing so in space/for space, as would its maintenance).
You minimize it, but "small" monumental jumps have had a very big impact, historically.
* Winged flight? Who needs it when we've got rail!
* Motor cars? What silly contraptions!
* Trains, for passengers? Ridiculous, nobody needs to go that fast!
* Go to the moon? What benefit is that? (Electronics industry revolution)
Also, imagine the opportunity for jump-starting another technological revolution. Due to the nature of space, this one, would, I suspect, be largely focused on 'reduce, reuse, recycle' as a core basis of functionality, not a dogma). Imagine: a small portable device which could take any waste petrol (eg. a processed food wrapper, or a great many of them) and turn it into a new, useful item. We're probably pretty close to being able to do that today, just not at an economy of scale. If there were a marketing push or something similar (say, the novelty brought on by 'astronauts are doing it'), such a thing - or something similar - could catch on.
Additionally, change in venue or requirements has often resulted in some interesting/novel/revolutionary improvements:
* Westerners improved their garments by observing the natives.
* New breeds of cattle were developed for use out West
* Canned goods were essentially 'invented' for Napoleon's large armies
* Larger, faster, more stable ships were invented to deal with the increased requirements of increased trans-Atlantic transit.
Just think how many 'common day' things we use today, on a daily basis, because someone decided the tool they were using did not work well within their specific constraints (but ended up being broadly applicable elsewhere, too):
* carbiner clips
* multitools/swiss army knives
* PDAs (and now, smartphones)
* post-it notes
I'm sure you can think of more. Those are the opportunities that further space exploration present.
I'm sure that, if there is a financial interest in doing so, someone will figure out how to get to the moon and stay there on a semi-permanent basis - if there's a financial case for doing so.