...I keep hearing that Fleury is unlikeable. That people hate him for his outspoken, brash style, etc. That he's money grubbing, that he's bad for open source -- whatever.
Funny thing is, the one or two times I've spoken to him in person I've walked away going, "Now there's a guy with his head on straight."
Running it is one thing. A more interesting question is "how fast?". What makes you think the technology in these new chips will allow to run virtual machines as fast or faster than you can run them today with VMware or Microsoft's products?
Ummm... because native hardware support for virtualization is bound to be faster than a software-emulated equivalent? What kind of question is that? Sure, let's wait until we see the benchmarks come out, but I doubt anybody is holding their breath on this one...
New releases at $6-$8 a disc; older stuff, $2 or $3. Enough to cover production. So what if they take a loss on the rights? They'll get it back in sales of units.
You're assuming that the player itself is not a loss leader. Microsoft took a loss on every Xbox it sold. I thought both Sony and Nintendo were doing the same on their home consoles. Why should the portable market be any different? If that's the case -- and I can't say for certain that it is but it seems plausible enough -- then obviously they're expecting to make their money back on content and so priced the UMDs accordingly.
Who is winning that race? From what I've heard, the VMWare management tools are far superior.
VMware is way out ahead. Their ESX Server product is worth paying for if you buy into their idea of "virtual infrastructure," which is basically doing the kind of stuff that mainframe users were doing years ago, only with commodity hardware. You can move virtual machines back and forth from different hardware resources, do automatic failover, all kinds of stuff. What the basic Server product can do is nothing when you consider what the full-blown product can do. In that sense, VMware has been very clever in releasing free products like VMware Player, and now Server, in that it helps everybody get their heads around the idea of virtual machines for day to day computing.
That said, there is no shortage of competitors, as far as companies that are trying to come up with tools. XenSource and Virtual Iron are two I can think of off the top of my head. Right now neither is positioning itself directly, head-to-head against ESX Server, because they know that's a hard road to climb. But eventually they'll have to. I have no doubt that Red Hat, and Novell especially, will be getting in on that action soon, too, given their support for Xen.
The next couple of years are going to be pretty interesting for the virtualization market.
Wow, now that's a good idea. I sure don't see anything immoral here, and certainly no potential for abuse.
Abuse is one thing, but what about straight-up backfires? Pipe bombs are still known to blow up in guerrillas' faces from time to time. If the U.S. is proposing waging a kind of guerrilla information war by releasing psy-ops info into the public Internet, what's the safeguard that will keep these lies, fake stories, and propaganda from blowing up in their authors' faces?
We've just seen cases where mainstream media has picked up on various phony April 1 stories around the Internet. How could this be any different? What happens when grass roots news gathering organizations get their hands on this stuff and publicize it? What happens when other world governments get hold of it? Who is authorized to know when something is actually fake? And how does the U.S. react when other countries begin using the same tactics?
And for that matter -- half kidding, but only half -- what does this mean for WikiPedia?
Microsoft sees VMWare as their enemy because they are banking cash today. (Thou shalt have no other vendors other than Microsoft) However Xen is probably the bigger threat.
Absolutely Xen is the bigger threat, but more importantly, the new Intel VT and AMD Pacifica chips are the writing on the wall for both VMware and Microsoft. The technology in these new chips makes it possible for XenSource to come out with a version of Xen that will run Windows, not just modified Xen OSes. It won't be hard for other folks to do the same. This obviates all the hard R&D work that Connectix and VMware put into doing the same thing without hardware support. In the very near future, the ability to provide virtualized systems and run virtual machines will be a non-issue. The only race left is to deliver the best support and management tools.
Annalee Newitz a "nerd"? This is a woman who, after a visit to New York City, actually wrote a column fretting about how difficult it was to figure out the New York subway system. I mean, come on. Maybe it would be more appropriate to introduce her as "pony-loving Annalee Newitz..."
Well, I do see where you're coming from. And at 33 you could call me a young fart, I guess -- not quite the "young" demographic per se. Staying in can be nice but dammit I still like to leave the house when I can. Maybe it's because I live in a city and that's just how we do.
I mean honestly, with the dropping cost of home entertainment systems is there really that much of a drive to spend the money to goto the theator any more?
There are some flicks I'll head out for, block buster action flicks usually (HP 4, Lion Witch and the Wardrobe, and Underworld 2 where the last 3 movies I saw in the theator). But for most movies my home entertainment system is plenty good enough.
I hear this argument a lot, and I see where you're coming from. But the way I grew up, people went out to the movies because it was an excuse to, you know... leave the house! It works like this: You find a nice girl, you go to a movie, you get dinner at a restaurant down the road from the theater, you chat about the film... et cetera.
Having a cool home theater system is nice and all but sometimes I just want a reason to go do something. And local theater is really, really hit or miss, and rock shows are loud and it sucks to have to stand around for hours after you've been working all week. What's wrong with going out to a movie?
And what about the theaters? They've had us over a barrel for years, charging insane prices for tickets and for food from the concession stand.
Well, I'm not sure you can totally blame the theaters for this behavior. I believe it starts with the studios, and what they demand from the theaters for the privilege of showing their movies. This is not just the fees to get a copy of the film, but stuff like refusing to release movies to theaters that aren't fitted with the latest Dolby Digital 12-speaker soundsystem, and so on. All that stuff costs money to maintain.
I'm not really thinking about the big theater chains here, though -- cry me a river there. But most independent movie theaters charge approximately the same prices for tickets and concessions. I always try to buy a bag of popcorn when I go to an indy film, because my understanding is that that's where the theater itself gets all its money. The ticket price only covers expenses.
It is unlikely that I will ever die from using heroin, or that I'll loose my arm like in Requiem for a Dream; I have pretty good hygene and adhere to safe injection techniques.
Don't kid yourself though. There's plenty of evidence that heroin abuse, or even the mere act of injecting, negatively impacts the immune system, leaving you open to a variety of ailments. Or go ask some of the folks here in San Francisco who have flesh-eating virus cuz they're shooting crappy cheap heroin that's been cut with dirt -- meaning dirt, from the ground -- which is basically like injecting a whole mess of bacteria right into their bloodstreams.
Blizzard is not an artist, it is a co-op of artists. The idea that a co-op can have more rights than an individual is ridiculous -- individuals have rights, co-ops are just groups of individuals trying to market a huge variety of products together.
I doubt sincerely that Blizzard is a cooperative in any sense of the word. It is a corporation, with management and a board of directors like any other. It's true that there are multiple creators who work for this single entity, but that doesn't make it a co-op. There is actually a clause in copyright law designed for this specific circumstance, called work made for hire.
Some of us feel that being proficient at your job and being comfortable are much more important than being a shortsighted, uninformed asshole in a fancy monkey suit.
The problem is on THEIR side.
No, I'm sorry, but the problem has always been on everybody's side. And as long as there are people with attitudes like yours on both sides, the problem will continue to exist.
If I ask you, "Is Citizen Kane a good movie?" and you say "no," and then I go and look at your DVD shelf and it's full of nothing but the complete runs of about twelve different series of anime, then I'm probably not going to be inclined to value your opinion very highly.
Similarly, if I ask you, "Do open source and open standards have credible value for my business?" and you say "Fuck yeah dude and anybody who tells you different is an asshole who sucks Bill Gates' cock all day!" and you're wearing a Penny Arcade t-shirt, shorts, four facial piercings, and a ponytail...
Surely you see my point? So get past your righteous indignation. It's not really all that righteous.
I could be wrong, but his spamming and his current indictment seem unrelated.
...except, of course, that they all stem from the same person.
I think that should be the message here. No matter how annoying spam is, it's seldom seen as the type of crime that anybody should really worry about. A lot of people probably don't even see it as a "crime" -- and by people, read legislators. The message from this story is that the kind of people who put together large-scale, organized spam operations are not only a financial burden on society but they are also, sometimes, serious scumbags. Think Al Capone and tax evasion; spam operations should be seen as a red flag for a gray-market mentality, at minimum. Dig a little further and you could find other, more serious criminal operations.
The closest thing in the world today to an actual government functioning in the ways that Britain's government is shown functioning are in those countries run by islamofacists or communists (Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, etc).
Which was sort of the point, right? Slippery slope and all that. Anyone who interpreted the movie as meaning "this is exactly what our government is like right now so you should go out and blow up public monuments" would be a little off-kilter. Raising the point that we probably shouldn't be going around and labeling other governments as being literally "evil" when our own country sees fit to merge religion and politics, throw bags over people's heads and torture them in prisons that the public-at-large isn't allowed to know the location of, use the media to maintain an Orwellian perpetual state of war, etc., etc., -- that seems valid to me. Entertainment, yes. But smarter entertainment than your average Hollywood action movie, that's for sure.
I wouldn't put too much stock in how something is marketed. That's your first mistake. The advertisements for Roman Polanski's "The Ninth Gate," which is mostly about books and European locations, billed it as a horror movie, complete with pounding heavy metal in the ads. Ditto "The Exorcism of Emily Rose," which was less a ripoff of "The Exorcist" than it was a courtroom drama. The current TV ads for the new Doctor Who on the Sci-Fi Channel seem to bill it as a pulse-pounding romp through space and time a la a more partying version of Quantum Leap. This isn't the fault of the source material, it's the fault of the shitty marketroids.
It depends on the situation and how good my lawyer is. Your faculty union can only protect you for so long, and if you're at a public institution you're a civil servant. Deal with it.
And there you have it, ladies and gentlemen. Doubtless you've all heard of this thing called "the American education system"? We usually talk about it like this: "The American education system isn't teaching students anything," or "the American education system can't compete in the global market," or "the American education system is a corrupt racket." Well, if you were wondering where this concept comes from, now you know.
While I do write notes, but I almost never referred back to them in the lower level classes (upper division work is usually another story). I tend to remember things as I write them down...
I used to think that, about remembering as I write things down. Now I just think taking notes was a waste of time. These days, unless there was a specific figure or statistic that I wanted to remember, or I wanted to write down keywords because I wanted to directly quote the speaker in a paper or something, I probably would forego most of the notes. One page of loose scribbles per class, nothing more. Paying attention to the speaker is what lets me absorb the most information.
P.S. That is, assuming the speaker isn't one of those who's so dull that you can't keep your eyes focused on them. Then you've got a problem.
P.P.S. And what I would do differently, on the other hand, is make a lot more effort to hit the books. I once had an instructor who told us in no uncertain terms at the beginning of the term that if all we did was listen to his lectures, we'd get a C on every test. And dammit, he was right on the money.
One of the best teachers I ever had (back in 1990) banned note taking entirely for his Trigonometry and Calculus classes. His view was that if you were taking notes, you would be focusing on writing down what you saw, rather than thinking about it. I can respect that and get behind it, since I've been there and know it works.
It's an interesting idea and I'd be sure to give it a try. I know I've gone through some language tapes based on the same theory -- don't think about it, don't try to repeat it, just pay attention -- and I've learned from them.
However, the professor in question wants people to switch from laptops to paper, basically making them less efficient at note-taking, giving them even less time to pay attention to what she's saying. I don't think she understands that side-effect.
Simple solution for you (if you were in the class in question): Put down the pen and stop taking notes. You've been there, so you know it works. What's stopping you?
Forcing attendance on people is so high school it makes me want to throw up.
Interesting! I thought forcing attendance on people was so high school that it made me drop out of community college. But I thought that was just some particular lame instructors at a penny-ante school -- I actually had no idea that the practice was so widespread. Yucch.
Oh man, did my ex- ever hate it too. She had never had a more dehumanizing shit job. Her voice would change just talking about it.
This was a company that actually made its employees bring all their belongings to the office in a transparent plastic bag. No other kind of bag was allowed but the officially-issued bag. At the end of every shift, she had to stand there while her shift manager inspected the contents of her bag -- medicines, tampons and all -- before she was allowed to leave. (Shoplifting, don't you know; most inventory shrink is the result of employee theft.)
When she finally told them where they could stuff it and walked off, she took her store-issued jacket with her. For a week or so they kept calling her, not to resolve the situation, but to get the jacket back. (Apparently they are hot items among collectors.) After she wouldn't return their calls, they went through her personnel file and began calling her parents at home -- on the opposite coast of the United States. Their assumption, seemingly, was that the parents would of course step up to their duty as parents and remind my ex- of her moral obligation to return the jacket.
Oddly enough, though, her least favorite part of the job was not the rules but the people, her coworkers. Because -- as you so eloquently put it in your quaint British way -- they were a miserable bunch of tossers. These people not only didn't mind the abuse, they practically lived for it. These were people who loved Disney so much, so blindly, that the fact that they hadn't been able to get a job at Disneyland was OK because at least they had landed themselves a job at the Disney Store, and that was damn well close enough.
There are people in the world who are just plain insane for Disney. I don't understand it now and I never will. But to this day, every time I walk past a Disney Store there is a little voice in my head that grumbles, "Fine. Let 'em rot in it."
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...I keep hearing that Fleury is unlikeable. That people hate him for his outspoken, brash style, etc. That he's money grubbing, that he's bad for open source -- whatever.
Funny thing is, the one or two times I've spoken to him in person I've walked away going, "Now there's a guy with his head on straight."
To each his own, I guess.
That said, there is no shortage of competitors, as far as companies that are trying to come up with tools. XenSource and Virtual Iron are two I can think of off the top of my head. Right now neither is positioning itself directly, head-to-head against ESX Server, because they know that's a hard road to climb. But eventually they'll have to. I have no doubt that Red Hat, and Novell especially, will be getting in on that action soon, too, given their support for Xen.
The next couple of years are going to be pretty interesting for the virtualization market.
We've just seen cases where mainstream media has picked up on various phony April 1 stories around the Internet. How could this be any different? What happens when grass roots news gathering organizations get their hands on this stuff and publicize it? What happens when other world governments get hold of it? Who is authorized to know when something is actually fake? And how does the U.S. react when other countries begin using the same tactics?
And for that matter -- half kidding, but only half -- what does this mean for WikiPedia?
Annalee Newitz a "nerd"? This is a woman who, after a visit to New York City, actually wrote a column fretting about how difficult it was to figure out the New York subway system. I mean, come on. Maybe it would be more appropriate to introduce her as "pony-loving Annalee Newitz..."
...this year's sampling of asinine non-jokes, made-up stories, and time wasters.
... gosh, you got me twice already.
I see we've actually begun several hours before April 1 this year
Well, I do see where you're coming from. And at 33 you could call me a young fart, I guess -- not quite the "young" demographic per se. Staying in can be nice but dammit I still like to leave the house when I can. Maybe it's because I live in a city and that's just how we do.
Having a cool home theater system is nice and all but sometimes I just want a reason to go do something. And local theater is really, really hit or miss, and rock shows are loud and it sucks to have to stand around for hours after you've been working all week. What's wrong with going out to a movie?
P.S. I know, I know ... I must be new here.
I'm not really thinking about the big theater chains here, though -- cry me a river there. But most independent movie theaters charge approximately the same prices for tickets and concessions. I always try to buy a bag of popcorn when I go to an indy film, because my understanding is that that's where the theater itself gets all its money. The ticket price only covers expenses.
Oh, OK, I didn't understand what you were saying. I thought you meant that you couldn't get it except in French.
I doubt sincerely that Blizzard is a cooperative in any sense of the word. It is a corporation, with management and a board of directors like any other. It's true that there are multiple creators who work for this single entity, but that doesn't make it a co-op. There is actually a clause in copyright law designed for this specific circumstance, called work made for hire.
If I ask you, "Is Citizen Kane a good movie?" and you say "no," and then I go and look at your DVD shelf and it's full of nothing but the complete runs of about twelve different series of anime, then I'm probably not going to be inclined to value your opinion very highly.
Similarly, if I ask you, "Do open source and open standards have credible value for my business?" and you say "Fuck yeah dude and anybody who tells you different is an asshole who sucks Bill Gates' cock all day!" and you're wearing a Penny Arcade t-shirt, shorts, four facial piercings, and a ponytail ...
Surely you see my point? So get past your righteous indignation. It's not really all that righteous.
Your information is out of date.
I think that should be the message here. No matter how annoying spam is, it's seldom seen as the type of crime that anybody should really worry about. A lot of people probably don't even see it as a "crime" -- and by people, read legislators. The message from this story is that the kind of people who put together large-scale, organized spam operations are not only a financial burden on society but they are also, sometimes, serious scumbags. Think Al Capone and tax evasion; spam operations should be seen as a red flag for a gray-market mentality, at minimum. Dig a little further and you could find other, more serious criminal operations.
I wouldn't put too much stock in how something is marketed. That's your first mistake. The advertisements for Roman Polanski's "The Ninth Gate," which is mostly about books and European locations, billed it as a horror movie, complete with pounding heavy metal in the ads. Ditto "The Exorcism of Emily Rose," which was less a ripoff of "The Exorcist" than it was a courtroom drama. The current TV ads for the new Doctor Who on the Sci-Fi Channel seem to bill it as a pulse-pounding romp through space and time a la a more partying version of Quantum Leap. This isn't the fault of the source material, it's the fault of the shitty marketroids.
P.S. That is, assuming the speaker isn't one of those who's so dull that you can't keep your eyes focused on them. Then you've got a problem.
P.P.S. And what I would do differently, on the other hand, is make a lot more effort to hit the books. I once had an instructor who told us in no uncertain terms at the beginning of the term that if all we did was listen to his lectures, we'd get a C on every test. And dammit, he was right on the money.
Have you seen the movie? I'd hardly call it an action movie. A call-to-action movie, maybe.
There's also a project to port Xen to OpenSolaris.
Oh man, did my ex- ever hate it too. She had never had a more dehumanizing shit job. Her voice would change just talking about it.
This was a company that actually made its employees bring all their belongings to the office in a transparent plastic bag. No other kind of bag was allowed but the officially-issued bag. At the end of every shift, she had to stand there while her shift manager inspected the contents of her bag -- medicines, tampons and all -- before she was allowed to leave. (Shoplifting, don't you know; most inventory shrink is the result of employee theft.)
When she finally told them where they could stuff it and walked off, she took her store-issued jacket with her. For a week or so they kept calling her, not to resolve the situation, but to get the jacket back. (Apparently they are hot items among collectors.) After she wouldn't return their calls, they went through her personnel file and began calling her parents at home -- on the opposite coast of the United States. Their assumption, seemingly, was that the parents would of course step up to their duty as parents and remind my ex- of her moral obligation to return the jacket.
Oddly enough, though, her least favorite part of the job was not the rules but the people, her coworkers. Because -- as you so eloquently put it in your quaint British way -- they were a miserable bunch of tossers. These people not only didn't mind the abuse, they practically lived for it. These were people who loved Disney so much, so blindly, that the fact that they hadn't been able to get a job at Disneyland was OK because at least they had landed themselves a job at the Disney Store, and that was damn well close enough.
There are people in the world who are just plain insane for Disney. I don't understand it now and I never will. But to this day, every time I walk past a Disney Store there is a little voice in my head that grumbles, "Fine. Let 'em rot in it."