Spend three minutes on Wikipedia with some of the topics of those studies (PVC, vinyl flooring, shampoo, phthalates) and look what you get:
"A recent British study showed that the phthalate di(n-butyl) phthalate (DBP) or its metabolite monobutyl phthalate (MBP) suppresses steroidogenesis by fetal-type Leydig cells in primates"
"Steroidogenesis is the process wherein desired forms of steroids are generated by transformation of other steroids."
There is no IT dept for the entire State of Texas. So, first of all, your analogy is flawed.
Secondly, the legislature writes the budget for the state's OS upgrades. It is certainly within their purview to forbid an especially worthless OS on a cost/benefit basis, regardless of technical considerations.
I was hoping Gmail Autopilot would be real. I only use Gmail as an outgoing SMTP server for sending documents to the appropriate recipients, which I automated with a bash script. I just happened to log into Gmail today because it forces you to log in and complete a captcha every once in a while. I noticed the CADIE thing and thought "oh cool, that might be useful".
That may all be true, for certain providers. But it is not true for "cloud computing" as a concept. Cloud computing is about using the network to make the most of available hardware.
It can be implemented on the scale of just a few dozen computers in a single site. LTSP is an example of this. DistCC is an example. Open/Mosix is an example. Hell even VMWare is an example.
It can also be implemented on the scale of a single global corporation. And there are many advantages to this. Lots of people are already (willingly) using "low-resource hardware" to access the net, because it is mobile and convenient. Giving them access to all of their data so that they can work while on-the-go is a huge advantage. When implemented on this scale, there is no loss of privacy, no anti-piracy interests involved, and FOSS only benefits because only open-standards based software is flexible enough to offer these type of solutions on this scale.
Ultimately, though "cloud computing" is not a "scheme". It is a computing paradigm grounded in the economic principle of making the most of available resources. The limited resources of computing (energy, processing-time, storage, bandwidth) will ultimately be optimized using flexible software and free-market principles. "Cloud" computing, utility computing, terminals and virtualization are all just slight variations on this theme. You are free to use any and all of them, or none at all, depending on your resources and preferences.
SourceForge offered a compile farm for nearly a decade. We have moved beyond that. We all want our own compile farms now. There are many reasons for this, not the least of which are resiliency and security. Open source is about not being beholden to commercial service providers, remember?
As for release distribution, the mature distros (read: Debian) long ago solved this problem with flexible packaging, network installs, gradual upgrades, and bittorrent.
I can't imagine RedHat has any particular value to any existing software vendors. A hardware vendor might make sense, but it would have to be a huge one. Anyone outside of the IT industry would be insane to purchase RedHat.
Clearly it would be beneficial to get a hold of RedHat's patent portfolio.
Also it would make sense to acquire a competitor, though I'm not sure who that would be. Microsoft would encounter regulatory roadblocks, Sun is on the verge of being bought-out itself. IBM doesn't see RedHat as any kind of threat; and I don't think they make enough on Linux services to want to buy a Linux vendor solely as a hedge.
Oracle seems to be a natural choice. RedHat has been pushing it's database and application server stuff for a while as a cheaper alternative to Oracle. Like another poster said, it would be beneficial for Oracle to absorb RedHat to support it's database products and eliminate a competitor. But it's not as though Oracle would be in any type of position to capitalize on any of RedHat's other markets. And it's not as though RedHat is much of a threat to Oracle anyways, since their products are in completely different price-ranges.
It would be interesting to see a company like Cisco buy RedHat. They could marry a rack of servers with the Cisco logo with a pared-down, remote-terminal type RedHat desktop that would run on a company's existing desktop hardware, only with much higher security and easier management. No anti-virus needed. No more time-consuming desktop patch management. Higher performance, more flexibility, and the latest buzz-word, Linux! It would be an easy way to jump into the server, desktop, and cloud markets all at once. And it would be an easy sell in a down economy, to companies that are weary of upgrading to Vista. Merge the Windows server and Cisco network admins. Outsource to a hosted Exchange service if you really need that, otherwise run a basic cross-platform groupware service on your new Cisco servers. It could work.
In any case, you don't do this because the old machines become a support nightmare and they draw more power than the new machines.
Hardly. A modern $500 desktop computer would have to consume on average 190 Watts less than the computer it replaces, 24 hours a day for at least three years, in order to justify it's purchase based on power savings alone. So there's not really any chance in hell of that happening, even if you're including monitors, which we're not since they can be upgraded separately. (I realize this is a simplistic assessment but I'd be happy to do a more thorough one if you don't believe me.)
As for support, well that's the reason I said "put them into the cloud as (smart) dumb terminals". Even complete hardware failure wouldn't cause anything more than a temporary inconvenience until a replacement could be provided.
It's often about the back room business agreements "business partners" then any tech. For example, Hertz Car Rental buys IBM and Cisco because they use Hertz cars almost exclusively. You can't fight this.
I've noticed this too. Though, it might not be politics, per se. It might be corporate bartering, for tax purposes.
But even your example doesn't disprove the general trend. Cisco and IBM both sell OSS.
Garner say 85 percent of companies are already using open source. In this day in age, if you companies is not using OS, they are a dinosaur.
Words cannot express the sheer cognitive dissonance involved in seeing these types of reports come from Gartner, a firm that has spent most of the last decade fellating Microsoft. Well, English words at least. I suppose the German would be "Schadenfreude".
"The Gartner survey results indicate that OSS in new projects is being deployed nearly equally in mission-critical and non-mission-critical situations."
What does "enterprise-ready" mean? I mean, I have a general idea of what people probably think it means. But, since you used it in addition to all those other qualifiers, I'd like to know what you think it means.
Debian boots in approximately one minute, even on pretty old hardware. If you spend some time removing unneeded services, removing the Grub timeout, and following some of the other boot optimization tips you find on the net, you can get it down to about half that.
Hopefully this will keep those worthless Baby Boomers from prematurely bankrupting Social Security with multiple prescriptions for their endless psychological disorders and sports injuries.
First of all, nothing distributes a "process", and there is definitely no "injection" going on.
Javascript source code is interpreted by your browser in almost the same way that HTML is interpreted. What runs and doesn't run is entirely controlled by you, since it is your browser.
Furthermore, as to copyright law, depending on your definition of derivative works and the extent of Federal jurisdiction, you likely have every right to modify and run the code you receive in any way you wish as long as you don't redistribute it to others.
I see a lot of Windows admins complaining lately; a lot of MSCE's griping about the job market.
Quite frankly, it's a good thing, and something that should have happened a few years ago. I think we will see the economic slump go on for some time. During that time a lot of secretaries running Windows will be replaced with tiny Perl scripts, and a lot of Windows admins will be replaced with Linux admins. And, yes, like you pointed out, some offshored functions will be brought back to the US, once our IT industry has been purged of a lot of unproductive rent-takers.
But, the midwest is especially bad, precisely because of years of outsourcing core competencies and making everything 100% Microsoft without any attention paid to long term costs.
Given the relative price difference between electricity and liquid fuels, it would make sense to produce liquid fuels from wood when possible, and use electricity for heat.
In fact, even without the heat pump, it would likely be economical to replace wood stoves with a small combined fermentation vessel and electric still, using the waste heat for home heating.
I doubt any of them are "much more efficient". Pyrolysis reactors operate at much higher temperatures than the 180 degrees Fahrenheit required to distill ethanol.
Do you have a particular process in mind? Any efficiency figures?
A not-insignificant number of Americans use wood for heat, and pay for gasoline. I'm sure many more Canadians and Europeans do as well. I know of two households that are on the grid, and still use a wood stove as their primary heat source. I wonder whether this could be made small enough to convince them to get a heat pump and an ethanol-fueled vehicle.
Sounds like the right architecture, but at a price.
It amazes me that so many "enterprise" IT companies can sell what are essentially just Linux servers with their brand name tacked-on, at a 5000% mark-up.
Perhaps an economy where merely having a job, any job is valued as being preferable to starvation and homelessness?
What are you talking about? That is our fucking economy.
We have workers whose sole job is to kill people on the other side of the world, for absolutely no benefit to anyone, and actually at a sizable cost, precisely so they can say that they have a job and they aren't starving or homeless.
And those people aren't widely considered to be brain-dead or worthless leaches on society, but fucking heroes.
When I look at the current generation, I don't see a generation that is bullshitting themselves. I see a generation that has been completely failed by a society that has sent all of it's good jobs to Asia, imported Mexicans to take the crappy jobs, taxed them to support their worthless grandparents, sent them to die in foreign lands, frittered away natural resources, completely stolen any chance of retirement or future prosperity, and then had the gall to label them as selfish and narcissistic.
It's not amazing that they spend a little time whining. It's amazing that they haven't just decided to kill us all yet.
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How exactly shall they determine cost/benefit without regard to technical considerations?
The same way you determine the cost/benefit ratio of a Porsche without actually knowing anything about racing.
The fact that Vista is more like a Gremlin than a Porsche only makes it that much easier.
Spend three minutes on Wikipedia with some of the topics of those studies (PVC, vinyl flooring, shampoo, phthalates) and look what you get:
"A recent British study showed that the phthalate di(n-butyl) phthalate (DBP) or its metabolite monobutyl phthalate (MBP) suppresses steroidogenesis by fetal-type Leydig cells in primates"
"Steroidogenesis is the process wherein desired forms of steroids are generated by transformation of other steroids."
"Products of steroidogenesis include: cortisol"
There is no IT dept for the entire State of Texas. So, first of all, your analogy is flawed.
Secondly, the legislature writes the budget for the state's OS upgrades. It is certainly within their purview to forbid an especially worthless OS on a cost/benefit basis, regardless of technical considerations.
I was hoping Gmail Autopilot would be real. I only use Gmail as an outgoing SMTP server for sending documents to the appropriate recipients, which I automated with a bash script. I just happened to log into Gmail today because it forces you to log in and complete a captcha every once in a while. I noticed the CADIE thing and thought "oh cool, that might be useful".
That may all be true, for certain providers. But it is not true for "cloud computing" as a concept. Cloud computing is about using the network to make the most of available hardware.
It can be implemented on the scale of just a few dozen computers in a single site. LTSP is an example of this. DistCC is an example. Open/Mosix is an example. Hell even VMWare is an example.
It can also be implemented on the scale of a single global corporation. And there are many advantages to this. Lots of people are already (willingly) using "low-resource hardware" to access the net, because it is mobile and convenient. Giving them access to all of their data so that they can work while on-the-go is a huge advantage. When implemented on this scale, there is no loss of privacy, no anti-piracy interests involved, and FOSS only benefits because only open-standards based software is flexible enough to offer these type of solutions on this scale.
Ultimately, though "cloud computing" is not a "scheme". It is a computing paradigm grounded in the economic principle of making the most of available resources. The limited resources of computing (energy, processing-time, storage, bandwidth) will ultimately be optimized using flexible software and free-market principles. "Cloud" computing, utility computing, terminals and virtualization are all just slight variations on this theme. You are free to use any and all of them, or none at all, depending on your resources and preferences.
SourceForge offered a compile farm for nearly a decade. We have moved beyond that. We all want our own compile farms now. There are many reasons for this, not the least of which are resiliency and security. Open source is about not being beholden to commercial service providers, remember?
As for release distribution, the mature distros (read: Debian) long ago solved this problem with flexible packaging, network installs, gradual upgrades, and bittorrent.
I can't imagine RedHat has any particular value to any existing software vendors. A hardware vendor might make sense, but it would have to be a huge one. Anyone outside of the IT industry would be insane to purchase RedHat.
Clearly it would be beneficial to get a hold of RedHat's patent portfolio.
Also it would make sense to acquire a competitor, though I'm not sure who that would be. Microsoft would encounter regulatory roadblocks, Sun is on the verge of being bought-out itself. IBM doesn't see RedHat as any kind of threat; and I don't think they make enough on Linux services to want to buy a Linux vendor solely as a hedge.
Oracle seems to be a natural choice. RedHat has been pushing it's database and application server stuff for a while as a cheaper alternative to Oracle. Like another poster said, it would be beneficial for Oracle to absorb RedHat to support it's database products and eliminate a competitor. But it's not as though Oracle would be in any type of position to capitalize on any of RedHat's other markets. And it's not as though RedHat is much of a threat to Oracle anyways, since their products are in completely different price-ranges.
It would be interesting to see a company like Cisco buy RedHat. They could marry a rack of servers with the Cisco logo with a pared-down, remote-terminal type RedHat desktop that would run on a company's existing desktop hardware, only with much higher security and easier management. No anti-virus needed. No more time-consuming desktop patch management. Higher performance, more flexibility, and the latest buzz-word, Linux! It would be an easy way to jump into the server, desktop, and cloud markets all at once. And it would be an easy sell in a down economy, to companies that are weary of upgrading to Vista. Merge the Windows server and Cisco network admins. Outsource to a hosted Exchange service if you really need that, otherwise run a basic cross-platform groupware service on your new Cisco servers. It could work.
In any case, you don't do this because the old machines become a support nightmare and they draw more power than the new machines.
Hardly. A modern $500 desktop computer would have to consume on average 190 Watts less than the computer it replaces, 24 hours a day for at least three years, in order to justify it's purchase based on power savings alone. So there's not really any chance in hell of that happening, even if you're including monitors, which we're not since they can be upgraded separately. (I realize this is a simplistic assessment but I'd be happy to do a more thorough one if you don't believe me.)
As for support, well that's the reason I said "put them into the cloud as (smart) dumb terminals". Even complete hardware failure wouldn't cause anything more than a temporary inconvenience until a replacement could be provided.
What do encrypted backups solve?
That solves the problem of having to read anything more than the story title.
It's often about the back room business agreements "business partners" then any tech. For example, Hertz Car Rental buys IBM and Cisco because they use Hertz cars almost exclusively. You can't fight this.
I've noticed this too. Though, it might not be politics, per se. It might be corporate bartering, for tax purposes.
But even your example doesn't disprove the general trend. Cisco and IBM both sell OSS.
Garner say 85 percent of companies are already using open source. In this day in age, if you companies is not using OS, they are a dinosaur.
http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=801412
Words cannot express the sheer cognitive dissonance involved in seeing these types of reports come from Gartner, a firm that has spent most of the last decade fellating Microsoft. Well, English words at least. I suppose the German would be "Schadenfreude".
"The Gartner survey results indicate that OSS in new projects is being deployed nearly equally in mission-critical and non-mission-critical situations."
What does "enterprise-ready" mean? I mean, I have a general idea of what people probably think it means. But, since you used it in addition to all those other qualifiers, I'd like to know what you think it means.
??
Firefox
SSH
LaTeX
qmail
sendmail
bind
Debian boots in approximately one minute, even on pretty old hardware. If you spend some time removing unneeded services, removing the Grub timeout, and following some of the other boot optimization tips you find on the net, you can get it down to about half that.
Something tells me that Google doesn't pay for service contracts. Or were you referring to companies larger than Google?
All that shit will be obsolete in two years or less, so this is a non-objection.
Exactly. Instead of putting old computers into the wastebin, put them into the cloud as (smart) dumb terminals.
Hopefully this will keep those worthless Baby Boomers from prematurely bankrupting Social Security with multiple prescriptions for their endless psychological disorders and sports injuries.
First of all, nothing distributes a "process", and there is definitely no "injection" going on.
Javascript source code is interpreted by your browser in almost the same way that HTML is interpreted. What runs and doesn't run is entirely controlled by you, since it is your browser.
Furthermore, as to copyright law, depending on your definition of derivative works and the extent of Federal jurisdiction, you likely have every right to modify and run the code you receive in any way you wish as long as you don't redistribute it to others.
You win a cookie. Some motherboards had jumpers back in the day. I'm not sure how prevalent it is lately, but from what I've seen, probably not very.
I see a lot of Windows admins complaining lately; a lot of MSCE's griping about the job market.
Quite frankly, it's a good thing, and something that should have happened a few years ago. I think we will see the economic slump go on for some time. During that time a lot of secretaries running Windows will be replaced with tiny Perl scripts, and a lot of Windows admins will be replaced with Linux admins. And, yes, like you pointed out, some offshored functions will be brought back to the US, once our IT industry has been purged of a lot of unproductive rent-takers.
But, the midwest is especially bad, precisely because of years of outsourcing core competencies and making everything 100% Microsoft without any attention paid to long term costs.
Given the relative price difference between electricity and liquid fuels, it would make sense to produce liquid fuels from wood when possible, and use electricity for heat.
In fact, even without the heat pump, it would likely be economical to replace wood stoves with a small combined fermentation vessel and electric still, using the waste heat for home heating.
I doubt any of them are "much more efficient". Pyrolysis reactors operate at much higher temperatures than the 180 degrees Fahrenheit required to distill ethanol.
Do you have a particular process in mind? Any efficiency figures?
A not-insignificant number of Americans use wood for heat, and pay for gasoline. I'm sure many more Canadians and Europeans do as well. I know of two households that are on the grid, and still use a wood stove as their primary heat source. I wonder whether this could be made small enough to convince them to get a heat pump and an ethanol-fueled vehicle.
In 1993, 3.1 million homes used wood for heat; the number dropped to 2 million in 2001
Sounds like the right architecture, but at a price.
It amazes me that so many "enterprise" IT companies can sell what are essentially just Linux servers with their brand name tacked-on, at a 5000% mark-up.
yet you continue crying foul.
That's cute. You're insulting my intelligence and mistaking me for the OP at the same time.
Perhaps an economy where merely having a job, any job is valued as being preferable to starvation and homelessness?
What are you talking about? That is our fucking economy.
We have workers whose sole job is to kill people on the other side of the world, for absolutely no benefit to anyone, and actually at a sizable cost, precisely so they can say that they have a job and they aren't starving or homeless.
And those people aren't widely considered to be brain-dead or worthless leaches on society, but fucking heroes.
When I look at the current generation, I don't see a generation that is bullshitting themselves. I see a generation that has been completely failed by a society that has sent all of it's good jobs to Asia, imported Mexicans to take the crappy jobs, taxed them to support their worthless grandparents, sent them to die in foreign lands, frittered away natural resources, completely stolen any chance of retirement or future prosperity, and then had the gall to label them as selfish and narcissistic.
It's not amazing that they spend a little time whining. It's amazing that they haven't just decided to kill us all yet.