Cisco is big in networking, but they're not big across the board in business the way IBM is, and that was my (admittedly vague:) point. IBM has clout in areas beyond the internet itself, and I think that's what can shift the balance here.
As an AC says, the problem of interfering with ham radio etc. needs to be solved, but there again -- IBM, being less monofocused, is more likely to provide the needful research funding to discover a fix for that problem (if such a fix is possible).
I don't know what's being done with 3G at all, but yeah, one of the problems has been that in rural areas, the specialty-broadband providers have you by the balls, and gouge accordingly. IMO this probably cuts into their profits over the long haul, as more people opt to do without rather than cough up an exhorbitant fee. They'd probably make more at standard prices, which everyone would see as equally affordable in that market.
My fixed wireless guy does that -- his pricing is about the same as DSL, so he even gets some metro customers who *have* DSL and cable available. This costs him very little, and makes him money he wouldn't otherwise get!
Electricity and basic phone lines have been in most of the American hinterland for decades -- tho there are parts of Montana that got power in my lifetime, and still lack phone service. Some parts of California still lack both. But overall, power and phone lines are reasonably ubiquitous.
However -- being in range of DSL is not. Rural phone lines won't support it, being many miles too far from the stations (range limit: about 3 miles). Cable has even less rural penetration. Fixed wireless/highspeed cellphone access is purely line of sight, which leaves much of the mountain west right out. Satellite is pricey and to my understanding, still not wholly practical.
Thus there are still big swaths of American where power-line access may be the most practical route; indeed, it may be the ONLY route for broadband of any sort.
I'm less than 50 miles from Los Angeles and 15 miles from a half-million pop suburb, yet I'm in an area that can't get DSL or cable (in fact I can't get better than 26k on POTS). Two years ago fixed wireless became available here.. but if my house was 50 feet further west, I'd be out of the necessary line of sight. This situation is a great deal more common than urban/suburban folk realise.
I don't know for sure, but it strikes me that having a big tech player like IBM behind it will make it a lot more likely to succeed. And yes, it's very much needed -- much of rural North America (I'd guess somewhat over half the total land mass outside of metro areas) has no practical broadband available, and no hope of ever being in range of cable, DSL, or even fixed wireless.
Toothpaste and alcohol also work well, for the same reason.
Some people (myself included) tend to have very little body odor, even when unwashed. Probably a matter of how "natural" one's surface flora are. Too much soap and chemicals can disrupt that natural flora.
I had a W.D. 6GB that made the most horrific clanking noises when it was doing its thermal calibration routine... it did this for 8 years before finally going tits-up (at which point it would sometimes lock up the system), but it never lost any data.
Its twin brother is now 11 years old and still in 24/7 use. It never made any noise, tho:)
I've had very few true failures, and I usually have a good double handful in service. The everyday drives typically last about 6 years tho I've had some go 8+ years, and my oldest running 24/7 right now was 11 years old last spring. I've never had a W.D. drive just quit -- they always give lots of warning, and I wind up nursing them along for months or years before I finally get around to replacing them.
The oldest IDE in my odd parts box is dated 1991, and it's still 100% perfect (for what little use a 20mb IDE HD is, other than as a curiosity!) as are the two 20mb MFM drives in my museum XT (both dated 1986).
One of my test drives was given to me as "failed" -- it was stictioned. I gave it several increasingly annoyed whacks, it made increasingly loud RRRRR noises, then abruptly booted up and has worked fine ever since. It is now over 12 years old!
In my experience, MOST "failed" HDs are actually software issues. The most common is the "FAT32 partition over 32GB *eats* files" bug, which looks for all the world like a HD failure, but in fact is purely software. (This is why there was a rash of "failed" HDs when the 40GB HDs came out -- as they were almost invariably partitioned as One Big FAT32 Disk.)
Similarly, Seagate found that 60% of RMA'd drives actually had NOTHING physically wrong with them.
My experience too -- most W.D. and Seagate drives fail either almost immediately, or after at least 5-6 years in servicem but almost never anywhere inbetween.
However, I've seen plenty of Maxtors that died after only a year or two in service, with absolutely NO warning. And since Seagate absorbed first Conner and then Maxtor, there've been some Seagates that did the one-or-two-year then instant-death thing.
I buy only W.D. HDs, because of the longevity factor, and because I've *never* had one "just fail" -- they always give me months or even years of warning, one way or another. And the HD in my oldest everyday system has been running 24/7 for 11 years now!!
BTW I asked W.D. about their HDs' designed-in lifespan, and they confirmed that it was 5 years.
Follow the money. This is all about deliberately tanking Western economies, to make them dependent on developing countries' exports, including energy. But we're apparently too dumb to realise that.
"Explain to me exactly how just giving a person money is going to pull them out of poverty."
It can't, because being "poor" is to some degree a state of mind, which is quite different from the state of "having no money".
Give a hungry person with a "poor" mentality $5, and they'll go to McDonalds and buy a burger and a shake and a lotto ticket. The $5 is gone and they only got one meal out of it.
Give someone with no money (but who does NOT have a "poor" mentality) the same $5, and they'll buy sensible groceries that can stretch that $5 into regular meals for at least a week.
The poor-mentality person can't see beyond today, and there's no such thing as thrift. And that's a lot of why poor people stay poor. No one forces them to think that way; they just can't or won't see beyond it.
When I was a kid we had no money, but we were NEVER "poor". We worked hard and made do and saved what we could, and seldom bought anything frivolous or that cost more than we could make it for ourselves, and ya know what? we lived decently, we never did without necessities, and we never had a bit of gov't help.
The problem is that the social "safety nets" have become extended to the lazy as well as to the unlucky. And this leads us to the situation in your sig.
UAE has effectively unlimited money to throw at such problems. Makes a big difference.
Otherwise, I agree with you. And at least in the near term, putting everything up on pilons might be a possibility -- and they can be extended as they sink or the ocean rises.
Since I gather it's mostly a tourist destination -- wouldn't an entire country up on pilons be a charming and unique destination?
Of course that requires a solid base under the island, which might not exist (any geologists or structural engineers here??)
The high-rise dorms (about 12 storeys) at Montana State University are on floating pilons that go well down into the muck. I don't recall the details, but it was quite the creative venture.
Since the place seems to function mainly as a high-class tourist trap, isn't it already to some degree being "assimilated" from the outside? Point being, it shouldn't be as traumatic for these people as for an isolated population, since they're already somewhat globalized.
Here's a tip: don't build cities at or below sea level, and you won't have these problems!
[eyeing large buildings] At the price of scrap metal, if the island goes underwater, they may well have enough readily-salvageable resources to buy whatever they want, just in construction frameworks, copper wiring, etc.
And do you remember the riots and mass unemployment that followed the immigration of millions from Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) to England in the late 1960s??
I do. Wasn't pretty. Some would contend that the British economy (and perhaps society) never entirely recovered.
Agreed on all counts. I call this "one function only" type of "creativity" DOING THE PLAYING FOR THE CHILD. It actively *prevents* kids from being genuinely creative.
Better to have to figure out how to create the specialty object from the generic parts -- now that's the way to stretch a kid's brain!
[Buy my "Home Brain Stretcher", built entirely from Legos and available for only $199.95!]
Tell me if I'm making shit up, but wouldn't it be possible to do it like this?
Run two VMs. Install your setup in both. Add apps to the 2nd VM. Do a DIFF of the two running VMs.
Dupe the 2nd VM to a 3rd VM, rinse and repeat the further steps.
And so on, saving the DIFF info between generations of VMs.
And only save DVD snapshots of each VM for "in case the process dies before I'm done, so I don't have to start over" and for archival documentation, but don't waste time DIFFing DVDs (which has gotta be WAY slower than DIFFing active VMs).
About the third time I mow the lawn each summer, ten minutes later there are dandelion heads raised high above the grass which I just got done cutting. After some bafflement, I figured it out -- after a few mowings teach them the folly of remaining upright, as soon as the mower noise starts, all the dandelions lay down flat, thus avoid being decapitated. As soon as the noise stops, they stand back up.
I've never seen any other plant do this. Dandelions re clearly smarter than the average weed, and deserving of our respect.
BTW, I have actually mowed a (small) lawn with scissors. As a technique, it's overrated. My arm complained for a week about how undignified it felt, and you should have heard screams from the scissors!!
Yeah, that's common enough... but even pressed DVDs are, to my understanding, inherently more fragile than they appear, and highly subject to environmental degradation. Any unsealed microhole and eventually the data layer is toast.:(
As to the inverse bell curve, I see it regularly in OEM computers (any brand) -- fairly high DOA rate, and after that... IMO they're designed to fail** due to always being on the edge of overheated. Those that survive past the designed-in time of death (3 to 5 years) usually live forever.
** Don't think so? stock top-of-the-line Dell, ran hot enough that it tended to lock up... I gave it the same very basic cooling any cheap clone gets, and its internal temp dropped FORTY degrees.
"Oh, didn't work out? that's because you didn't do [insert BS routine here]. Why, yes, we can help you, for a suitable fee..." Rinse and repeat until the wallet is empty.
Slashdot Mirror
Cisco is big in networking, but they're not big across the board in business the way IBM is, and that was my (admittedly vague :) point. IBM has clout in areas beyond the internet itself, and I think that's what can shift the balance here.
As an AC says, the problem of interfering with ham radio etc. needs to be solved, but there again -- IBM, being less monofocused, is more likely to provide the needful research funding to discover a fix for that problem (if such a fix is possible).
I don't know what's being done with 3G at all, but yeah, one of the problems has been that in rural areas, the specialty-broadband providers have you by the balls, and gouge accordingly. IMO this probably cuts into their profits over the long haul, as more people opt to do without rather than cough up an exhorbitant fee. They'd probably make more at standard prices, which everyone would see as equally affordable in that market.
My fixed wireless guy does that -- his pricing is about the same as DSL, so he even gets some metro customers who *have* DSL and cable available. This costs him very little, and makes him money he wouldn't otherwise get!
Electricity and basic phone lines have been in most of the American hinterland for decades -- tho there are parts of Montana that got power in my lifetime, and still lack phone service. Some parts of California still lack both. But overall, power and phone lines are reasonably ubiquitous.
However -- being in range of DSL is not. Rural phone lines won't support it, being many miles too far from the stations (range limit: about 3 miles). Cable has even less rural penetration. Fixed wireless/highspeed cellphone access is purely line of sight, which leaves much of the mountain west right out. Satellite is pricey and to my understanding, still not wholly practical.
Thus there are still big swaths of American where power-line access may be the most practical route; indeed, it may be the ONLY route for broadband of any sort.
I'm less than 50 miles from Los Angeles and 15 miles from a half-million pop suburb, yet I'm in an area that can't get DSL or cable (in fact I can't get better than 26k on POTS). Two years ago fixed wireless became available here.. but if my house was 50 feet further west, I'd be out of the necessary line of sight. This situation is a great deal more common than urban/suburban folk realise.
I don't know for sure, but it strikes me that having a big tech player like IBM behind it will make it a lot more likely to succeed. And yes, it's very much needed -- much of rural North America (I'd guess somewhat over half the total land mass outside of metro areas) has no practical broadband available, and no hope of ever being in range of cable, DSL, or even fixed wireless.
Toothpaste and alcohol also work well, for the same reason.
Some people (myself included) tend to have very little body odor, even when unwashed. Probably a matter of how "natural" one's surface flora are. Too much soap and chemicals can disrupt that natural flora.
I had a W.D. 6GB that made the most horrific clanking noises when it was doing its thermal calibration routine... it did this for 8 years before finally going tits-up (at which point it would sometimes lock up the system), but it never lost any data.
Its twin brother is now 11 years old and still in 24/7 use. It never made any noise, tho :)
I've had very few true failures, and I usually have a good double handful in service. The everyday drives typically last about 6 years tho I've had some go 8+ years, and my oldest running 24/7 right now was 11 years old last spring. I've never had a W.D. drive just quit -- they always give lots of warning, and I wind up nursing them along for months or years before I finally get around to replacing them.
The oldest IDE in my odd parts box is dated 1991, and it's still 100% perfect (for what little use a 20mb IDE HD is, other than as a curiosity!) as are the two 20mb MFM drives in my museum XT (both dated 1986).
One of my test drives was given to me as "failed" -- it was stictioned. I gave it several increasingly annoyed whacks, it made increasingly loud RRRRR noises, then abruptly booted up and has worked fine ever since. It is now over 12 years old!
In my experience, MOST "failed" HDs are actually software issues. The most common is the "FAT32 partition over 32GB *eats* files" bug, which looks for all the world like a HD failure, but in fact is purely software. (This is why there was a rash of "failed" HDs when the 40GB HDs came out -- as they were almost invariably partitioned as One Big FAT32 Disk.)
Similarly, Seagate found that 60% of RMA'd drives actually had NOTHING physically wrong with them.
My experience too -- most W.D. and Seagate drives fail either almost immediately, or after at least 5-6 years in servicem but almost never anywhere inbetween.
However, I've seen plenty of Maxtors that died after only a year or two in service, with absolutely NO warning. And since Seagate absorbed first Conner and then Maxtor, there've been some Seagates that did the one-or-two-year then instant-death thing.
I buy only W.D. HDs, because of the longevity factor, and because I've *never* had one "just fail" -- they always give me months or even years of warning, one way or another. And the HD in my oldest everyday system has been running 24/7 for 11 years now!!
BTW I asked W.D. about their HDs' designed-in lifespan, and they confirmed that it was 5 years.
World War III ??
Follow the money. This is all about deliberately tanking Western economies, to make them dependent on developing countries' exports, including energy. But we're apparently too dumb to realise that.
"Explain to me exactly how just giving a person money is going to pull them out of poverty."
It can't, because being "poor" is to some degree a state of mind, which is quite different from the state of "having no money".
Give a hungry person with a "poor" mentality $5, and they'll go to McDonalds and buy a burger and a shake and a lotto ticket. The $5 is gone and they only got one meal out of it.
Give someone with no money (but who does NOT have a "poor" mentality) the same $5, and they'll buy sensible groceries that can stretch that $5 into regular meals for at least a week.
The poor-mentality person can't see beyond today, and there's no such thing as thrift. And that's a lot of why poor people stay poor. No one forces them to think that way; they just can't or won't see beyond it.
When I was a kid we had no money, but we were NEVER "poor". We worked hard and made do and saved what we could, and seldom bought anything frivolous or that cost more than we could make it for ourselves, and ya know what? we lived decently, we never did without necessities, and we never had a bit of gov't help.
The problem is that the social "safety nets" have become extended to the lazy as well as to the unlucky. And this leads us to the situation in your sig.
UAE has effectively unlimited money to throw at such problems. Makes a big difference.
Otherwise, I agree with you. And at least in the near term, putting everything up on pilons might be a possibility -- and they can be extended as they sink or the ocean rises.
Since I gather it's mostly a tourist destination -- wouldn't an entire country up on pilons be a charming and unique destination?
Of course that requires a solid base under the island, which might not exist (any geologists or structural engineers here??)
The high-rise dorms (about 12 storeys) at Montana State University are on floating pilons that go well down into the muck. I don't recall the details, but it was quite the creative venture.
Since the place seems to function mainly as a high-class tourist trap, isn't it already to some degree being "assimilated" from the outside? Point being, it shouldn't be as traumatic for these people as for an isolated population, since they're already somewhat globalized.
Here's a tip: don't build cities at or below sea level, and you won't have these problems!
[eyeing large buildings] At the price of scrap metal, if the island goes underwater, they may well have enough readily-salvageable resources to buy whatever they want, just in construction frameworks, copper wiring, etc.
And do you remember the riots and mass unemployment that followed the immigration of millions from Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) to England in the late 1960s??
I do. Wasn't pretty. Some would contend that the British economy (and perhaps society) never entirely recovered.
Agreed on all counts. I call this "one function only" type of "creativity" DOING THE PLAYING FOR THE CHILD. It actively *prevents* kids from being genuinely creative.
Better to have to figure out how to create the specialty object from the generic parts -- now that's the way to stretch a kid's brain!
[Buy my "Home Brain Stretcher", built entirely from Legos and available for only $199.95!]
Tell me if I'm making shit up, but wouldn't it be possible to do it like this?
Run two VMs.
Install your setup in both.
Add apps to the 2nd VM.
Do a DIFF of the two running VMs.
Dupe the 2nd VM to a 3rd VM, rinse and repeat the further steps.
And so on, saving the DIFF info between generations of VMs.
And only save DVD snapshots of each VM for "in case the process dies before I'm done, so I don't have to start over" and for archival documentation, but don't waste time DIFFing DVDs (which has gotta be WAY slower than DIFFing active VMs).
A funny and true story proving plant sentience:
About the third time I mow the lawn each summer, ten minutes later there are dandelion heads raised high above the grass which I just got done cutting. After some bafflement, I figured it out -- after a few mowings teach them the folly of remaining upright, as soon as the mower noise starts, all the dandelions lay down flat, thus avoid being decapitated. As soon as the noise stops, they stand back up.
I've never seen any other plant do this. Dandelions re clearly smarter than the average weed, and deserving of our respect.
BTW, I have actually mowed a (small) lawn with scissors. As a technique, it's overrated. My arm complained for a week about how undignified it felt, and you should have heard screams from the scissors!!
Ah yes, Switzerland, that bastion of sanity -- where one must consider the "dignity" of plants.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/015/065njdoe.asp
http://www.practicalethicsnews.com/practicalethics/2008/04/the-dignity-of.html
(and numerous other references, these were just the first two I came to)
Yeah, that's common enough... but even pressed DVDs are, to my understanding, inherently more fragile than they appear, and highly subject to environmental degradation. Any unsealed microhole and eventually the data layer is toast. :(
As to the inverse bell curve, I see it regularly in OEM computers (any brand) -- fairly high DOA rate, and after that... IMO they're designed to fail** due to always being on the edge of overheated. Those that survive past the designed-in time of death (3 to 5 years) usually live forever.
** Don't think so? stock top-of-the-line Dell, ran hot enough that it tended to lock up... I gave it the same very basic cooling any cheap clone gets, and its internal temp dropped FORTY degrees.
Heh, I had the exact same thought.
"Oh, didn't work out? that's because you didn't do [insert BS routine here]. Why, yes, we can help you, for a suitable fee..." Rinse and repeat until the wallet is empty.
Also, if you read the comments, there's one from someone who used the company, and per their description, it's basically a scam.
Not true of DVDs, which to my understanding can deteriorate even without damage.
I've bought new-in-box DVDs that were defective, without any visible damage. :(
But once the $10Mers are taxed down to sub-$100k levels, who is going to pay the wages for those NOT making $10M ???
Oh, did someone forget about that? Seems you've got to be making money before you can afford to pay someone else to work for you. How 'bout that!!