It also tries to integrate your torrent downloads so that you can track them from Miro as well.
I'm running this on a mac and it appears that there's still not yet a proper solution for a torrent client with RSS. UTorrent was recently released for mac but it lacks many key features of the Windows client such as the RSS feed. http://tvrss.net/ seems to be a good, clean torrent feed and you can key in search terms to make sure you're only getting one provider of the show at a time. Will probably work great on Windows.
I'm a recent mac convert and am surprised to read other mac heads saying they preferred running windows torrent programs under wine or in xp under parallels rather than deal with the sucky offerings for mac clients.
It seems as if something like this would attract vagrants, significant vandalism and just plain disgustingness. Would be pretty cool though if major cities were only filled with people like the scientists and engineers would designed it.
I don't know the particulars of this system but I can make a couple of assumptions on how this can be handled.
1. You pay for your trip via credit card. 2. A vehicle arrives for your use. If it is unsanitary, you press a button and it routes back to maintenance for cleaning. 3. Any vehicle flagged for maintenance will have its passenger log reviewed. Any passenger racks up 3 sanitary flaggings by passengers using the vehicle after him will be banned from the service for a month.
I'm less enthusiastic about putting video cameras in the cab to directly record vandalism, it could just as easily be abused as any other reasonable control people think of, but I think the flagging system should be relatively abuse-resistant. And I'd feel very pleased to see punks suffering the consequences of their actions. I for one am sick of going into a nice business and seeing the restrooms vandalized by stupid rich white kids who think they're ghetto because they listen to M&M.
I'm still a big fan of skytran. I don't know if the political and financial support is there but the economics seem reasonable and I think it's certainly an engineering possibility, not relying on unobtanium or anything wild.
The link to the website goes into far greater detail but the nickel synopsis is this:
1. Two passenger monorail cars using a computerized rail system to rapidly route passengers to destinations, avoiding the stop and start of traditional subway and light rail. (Monorail, yes monorail! Your simspon reference is weak, shut up.) 2. Cars, rails and towers are designed to be light so the footprint on the ground is about the same as a telephone pole. 3. With all the rails in the air, real estate on the ground can be used for pretty much anything, avoiding the disruptive problems and huge expense of running traditional light rail lines. 4. Because the lines are cheaper, a grid can be laid over a sprawling metropolitan area lacking the high population densities required to make traditional mass transit viable. 5. The goal is to have stops spread about everywhere so that where you want to go should be no more than a 15 minute walk after arrival. Current mass transit can leave you with miles to go to your destination. 6. Since the cars are electric and make no more than a whooshing line when going overhead, they would not be as disruptive as a conventional light rail train or a city bus.
The goal with skytran is not to replace cars but to take commuters off the road. Anyone as a single occupant in a car going places could be in one of these and free up the roads for people whose trips cannot be accomplished via skytran.
Of course, the real problem we're looking at here is that zero thought has been put into sustainable urban planning. We tend to ad hoc and half-ass everything together and end up with designs that are simply unworkable. But hey, that's the human way. Maybe the energy crunch can force a reevaluation of that.
I use a Palm Tungsten as my ebook reader. It was expensive as hell when it came out but you can get it or something comparable for under $30 today. It has an open architecture, more flexibility, so why does the Kindle cost an arm and a leg? Is the e-ink display tech driving the price or do they just charge what they can because they can?
I never understood why so many services were running by default in the first place.
I always thought it would make more sense to provide three big buttons on setup as well as an advanced tab. Those buttons are the presets: everything off, the most popular stuff on, and everything on. The advanced tabs would let you tweak the specifics.
There's so much extraneous crap running on a typical Windows install it just blows me away. I'm less familiar with Linux and OS X but from what I've seen they are as guilty at times.
Incidentally, this also brings up my beef about software updaters. I have no problem with them running once a week at startup, checking the net for an update and terminating. But these fuckers remain running in the background constantly like Google updater. Look, do I really care to know the second a new program is released, a new patch? Look, why can't you just tell me the next time I reboot? Or hell, just run the updater when I execute the specific program and piss off when finished.
I understand that modern software is really complicated and I'd feel a little less free to complain about bloat if I knew everything that went on in the background. Well, I still wonder what things would be like if I were God Emperor of the World and said that nobody could buy faster machines for a decade, they had to stick with what they had. We see that happen with video game consoles, having a fixed platform to develop for over a period of years, the optimizations that are developed. PC's move so damn fast that by the time anyone figures out the hardware there's something new to write for. And management pays for new features, not optimization. But if they couldn't just demand people buy a faster computer, if they had to work within the resources at hand, I bet our stuff would be running two or three times faster by the end of the decade, just from doing it right the second time.
I'd hook it up so it would emit a tiny electric discharge every time it senses something I should be warned about, a tingle if you will. I'll call it my spidey sense. It would also help me rationalize getting a tattoo like this.
As I recall, the US economy got a boost from reduction in arms spending post-Communism, in the Clinton era. I remember discussions in the UK before that on how Japan benefited commercially from not having a significant military, meaning that not only did they not have to pay for it out of taxes, but engineers who might be making missiles could work on things like better cars.
There was the talk of the peace dividend we'd see after "winning" the Cold War but it never materialized. We're spending more now than ever on the military.
To generalise wildly, countries with large military R&D spending and manufacturing tend not to be good at consumer products. Military "GNP" is akin to making lots of expensive goods and then putting them all on a bonfire.
There was a good little book, The Rise and Fall of Great Powers (I think) and the author said there was a rule of thumb that could be seen through the nation-state era -- exceed a certain percentage of GDP spent on the military and see yourself become marginalized. Anyone who has played Civilization immediately grasps the principle here. Your have x resource units per turn. Your economy will grow at a rate of y and your military power at a rate of z. Too much money spent on the military, you end up not having an economy that can support it, not to mention you'll be driving around with obsolete weapons while your opponents have modern kit. Too little money spent on the military and your thriving cities will be snapped up by your militant neighbors. And it doesn't help that the bastard computer cheats.
The rule of thumb the author came up with was 5%. Keep it at or below that, your economy will keep up a reasonable rate of growth. Exceed that and you risk hollowing yourself out. He calculated that the Soviets were spending something like a third of their GDP on the military. The result is that they had a first world military by some standards but a third world economy that simply could not support it. An analogy would be the freakish weight-lifters who have so much muscle mass that their hearts are struggling just as bad as if the guy was a 500lb tub of lard.
The whole problem with the military-industrial complex is that there's too damn much money to be made in producing weapons. Get enough weapons lying around, people are inclined to use them.
This is a game we can't afford to play. The cost of wrecking satellites is trivially low compared to the cost of replacing them. I would put space warfare on the same level as chemical warfare, if not in terms of human cost but damage done to the treasury. In WWII, both sides had the gas masks in case the other side used it first but neither did for fear of the chemical counter-attack. And this is in a war where carpet-bombing cities was considered an acceptable tactic.
Here's a question: years ago I read that a poor man's ASAT would be a booster capable of reaching a retrograde orbit on the same orbit as the target. It doesn't contain a guided kinetic kill video, just a big bucket of sand. The sand is released after the orbit is circularized and it becomes a giant, fine-grained shotgun blast that will destroy any satellite on the same plane. Is this one of those hoary chestnuts that just isn't true or is it very plausible?
The other question which I know is serious and yet unanswered: how much shrapnel would be left from an unrestricted space war? Would we be denying ourselves the use of certain orbits for hundreds of years? Low earth orbits will see the junk slowed by the atmosphere and burn up in time but high orbits would be free from the drag and could be there indefinitely. Would it even be possible to armor satellites sufficiently to survive the debris or would we have screwed ourselves but good?
Depends on if you define "more geeky" as a good thing or a bad thing. The chart implies who looks down upon whom, note the direction the arrows point, both ways. Pokemon fans over the age of six still feel superior to furries and furries likewise feel superior to them.
If you look at the market, you see a lot of giveaways that used to be unthinkable. McDonalds is doing "free latte mondays" to draw business away from Starbucks while Denny's is giving away a free Grand Slam breakfast [dennys.com] to each visitor tomorrow in an attempt to push coupon books out to customers. (Thus encouraging them to think about the large and inexpensive breakfast they can get there.)
The key is that these businesses have solid revenue models that their giveaways promote. Web-based businesses are in a slightly tighter pickel. With advertising budgets getting slashed across the board, ad-supported websites are feeling the same pinch as print and broadcast media. Now is the time to find alternative revenue streams such as premium content to back their free services. Things like selling larger downloadable versions of free web games or state tax filings [taxact.com] to go with free Federal filings.
I think there's a difference between McDonalds giving away free hamburgers and Wikipedia. The summary makes a good point "an be produced and distributed at virtually no marginal cost, and so, by the laws of economics, price has gone the same way, to $0.00." but misses the totality of it. What the net does is remove intermediaries, the middle-men. If I write a book the cost of production is my own time, plus my editor's time. If I want to make $50k a year off of that, I need to sell some ungodly millions of dollars worth of that book because I'm paying for printing, warehousing, distribution, space on bookshelves, not to mention all of the inflated salaries and bonuses sucked up by the bloatworms in this whole process.
I'll move far less copies selling direct but I don't have to sell as many to earn a living. Will it be a tough gig? Hell, yeah, but it wasn't exactly easy to be a professional musician or writer back in the 60's, either.
I think what will really help move digital product is a greater feeling of connection with the creators. I wouldn't see the need to give any more money to the rapper running around with multi-million dollar contract, assuming I liked rap, but I'd want to support the little guy who's just starting out, I want to see more work from him.
The patronage model seems too altruistic to work in the real world but we're seeing signs that it really is possible.
Vista was shoved out the door too early without enough time to season. So for their second whack at it, which they've conveniently renamed to disguise the fact that it's a second whack, they're shoving it out the door too early without enough time to season. Consistency is a good thing but not when you're doing it wrong.
Was installing Chrome on my laptop and got that error message. "www.google.com/chrome may be malware!"
Gee, don't be so hard on yourself, Google. I'm sure you have some good points.
The funny thing is I googled "google everything is malware" to see if anyone else was noticing this. Yes, boards were indexed with the discussion but I had to manually cut and paste the urls to read threads.
I'm just pontificating here but I think we might not see the vast sweeping in of some new wholly dominant OS but a fragmentation of various solutions that work. A company might run a uniform platform just for IT's sake but that doesn't mean the company next door is running the same flavor.
I really like OSX but I don't think Apple is trying to position it for the corporate desktop. The friendly Linuxes like Ubuntu remain incredibly strong.
People have been predicting the era of the thinclient for years. Their arguments were compelling but nothing happened. There's advantages to having thick clients and you're simply not going to be able to deliver graphically-intensive content over the pipe, not for at least another generation or three.
My prediction for what might make sense (not that it will 100% happen but at least is plausible) is for businesses to go with thick client closed box PC's. The phone system is the model here. There's nothing to tweak inside a PC anymore. There's not really any such thing as computer repair. At most you have a hard drive go bad, rarely a stick of ram dies. For the most part any problem is going to be software.
What we're going to see is all-in-one PC's on the typical desktop, built like the new iMac with the computer sitting in the back of the monitor. (Though there will also be the option of connecting a pure thinclient to the same network.) Easy to install, easy to replace. It will have a custom linux install on it and can run apps either locally or via citrix windows. These all-in-one PC's will also have multiple video ports so that additional monitors can be driven from the same machine. Legacy Windows apps will run in Wine, complicated legacy apps will be served via the citrix or whatever server, and new apps will probably be developed for Linux but served out for the legacy Windows boxes. That's the situation we're in now with web appps acting as the platform-agnostic way of serving data to PC, Mac, Linux, phones, etc.
I think for the typical 20 person office there will be one server in the back room running everything, maybe a failover box duplicating all of the resources. The major apps are housed locally so that they can keep working in case of a network problem but it will all phone back to the main office for synchronizaiton. Database-driven apps will work along the Google Gears model where offline copies of recent data are stored on the client or at the location's server so that failover from network problems is seamless. And because telephony is all going to IP, your phone guys and your computer guys will eventually become the same guy, it'll all fall under the aegis of "office electronic stuff."
I think we're going to see much longer product upgrade cycles since there isn't a compelling reason to upgrade every 2-3 years. We might see terminals lasting happily for 8-10 years, maybe longer. There will still be big-box PC's in the office for those who need something special but that will be the exception.
Now just because this all seems reasonable that's not to say it'll happen this way. But I just see a migration away from Windows, it seems like Microsoft simply cannot innovate fast enough these days. (maybe wishful thinking, maybe not.)
We all live in a human-powered submarine, human-powered submarine, human-powered submarine! Yes, the drugs are responsible for this album, responsible for this album, responsible for this album.
Suddenly being able to wipe out everything doesn't sound too difficult does it? From what I heard from friends- it was just a couple lines of shell, and it was discovered because there was a typo, and script to failed. Not a virus by any stretch.
That same scenario happened less than a year back at another company, a DBA was being fired for poor performance and he wrote a script to trash his company's databases and yup, typo. Looks like both these bozos were fired for cause: incompetence.:)
And then there are british comedies that to my mind at least, have no redeeming value whatever. For example, Absolutely Fabulous, and Are You Being Served?.
I agree with you 100% on AbFab but Are You Being Served? You don't find that funny, not in the least bit, Hatta? I'm disappointed in you.
Slashdot Mirror
It also tries to integrate your torrent downloads so that you can track them from Miro as well.
I'm running this on a mac and it appears that there's still not yet a proper solution for a torrent client with RSS. UTorrent was recently released for mac but it lacks many key features of the Windows client such as the RSS feed. http://tvrss.net/ seems to be a good, clean torrent feed and you can key in search terms to make sure you're only getting one provider of the show at a time. Will probably work great on Windows.
I'm a recent mac convert and am surprised to read other mac heads saying they preferred running windows torrent programs under wine or in xp under parallels rather than deal with the sucky offerings for mac clients.
It seems as if something like this would attract vagrants, significant vandalism and just plain disgustingness. Would be pretty cool though if major cities were only filled with people like the scientists and engineers would designed it.
I don't know the particulars of this system but I can make a couple of assumptions on how this can be handled.
1. You pay for your trip via credit card.
2. A vehicle arrives for your use. If it is unsanitary, you press a button and it routes back to maintenance for cleaning.
3. Any vehicle flagged for maintenance will have its passenger log reviewed. Any passenger racks up 3 sanitary flaggings by passengers using the vehicle after him will be banned from the service for a month.
I'm less enthusiastic about putting video cameras in the cab to directly record vandalism, it could just as easily be abused as any other reasonable control people think of, but I think the flagging system should be relatively abuse-resistant. And I'd feel very pleased to see punks suffering the consequences of their actions. I for one am sick of going into a nice business and seeing the restrooms vandalized by stupid rich white kids who think they're ghetto because they listen to M&M.
I'm still a big fan of skytran. I don't know if the political and financial support is there but the economics seem reasonable and I think it's certainly an engineering possibility, not relying on unobtanium or anything wild.
The link to the website goes into far greater detail but the nickel synopsis is this:
1. Two passenger monorail cars using a computerized rail system to rapidly route passengers to destinations, avoiding the stop and start of traditional subway and light rail. (Monorail, yes monorail! Your simspon reference is weak, shut up.)
2. Cars, rails and towers are designed to be light so the footprint on the ground is about the same as a telephone pole.
3. With all the rails in the air, real estate on the ground can be used for pretty much anything, avoiding the disruptive problems and huge expense of running traditional light rail lines.
4. Because the lines are cheaper, a grid can be laid over a sprawling metropolitan area lacking the high population densities required to make traditional mass transit viable.
5. The goal is to have stops spread about everywhere so that where you want to go should be no more than a 15 minute walk after arrival. Current mass transit can leave you with miles to go to your destination.
6. Since the cars are electric and make no more than a whooshing line when going overhead, they would not be as disruptive as a conventional light rail train or a city bus.
The goal with skytran is not to replace cars but to take commuters off the road. Anyone as a single occupant in a car going places could be in one of these and free up the roads for people whose trips cannot be accomplished via skytran.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SkyTran
Of course, the real problem we're looking at here is that zero thought has been put into sustainable urban planning. We tend to ad hoc and half-ass everything together and end up with designs that are simply unworkable. But hey, that's the human way. Maybe the energy crunch can force a reevaluation of that.
I use a Palm Tungsten as my ebook reader. It was expensive as hell when it came out but you can get it or something comparable for under $30 today. It has an open architecture, more flexibility, so why does the Kindle cost an arm and a leg? Is the e-ink display tech driving the price or do they just charge what they can because they can?
I never understood why so many services were running by default in the first place.
I always thought it would make more sense to provide three big buttons on setup as well as an advanced tab. Those buttons are the presets: everything off, the most popular stuff on, and everything on. The advanced tabs would let you tweak the specifics.
There's so much extraneous crap running on a typical Windows install it just blows me away. I'm less familiar with Linux and OS X but from what I've seen they are as guilty at times.
Incidentally, this also brings up my beef about software updaters. I have no problem with them running once a week at startup, checking the net for an update and terminating. But these fuckers remain running in the background constantly like Google updater. Look, do I really care to know the second a new program is released, a new patch? Look, why can't you just tell me the next time I reboot? Or hell, just run the updater when I execute the specific program and piss off when finished.
I understand that modern software is really complicated and I'd feel a little less free to complain about bloat if I knew everything that went on in the background. Well, I still wonder what things would be like if I were God Emperor of the World and said that nobody could buy faster machines for a decade, they had to stick with what they had. We see that happen with video game consoles, having a fixed platform to develop for over a period of years, the optimizations that are developed. PC's move so damn fast that by the time anyone figures out the hardware there's something new to write for. And management pays for new features, not optimization. But if they couldn't just demand people buy a faster computer, if they had to work within the resources at hand, I bet our stuff would be running two or three times faster by the end of the decade, just from doing it right the second time.
Then again, after looking at Vista I suppose this is at least plausible... Where's the press release?
I'd hook it up so it would emit a tiny electric discharge every time it senses something I should be warned about, a tingle if you will. I'll call it my spidey sense. It would also help me rationalize getting a tattoo like this.
http://www.geekologie.com/2008/04/23/spiderman-tat-1.jpg
Drug dealers and minorities do, WASP billionaires don't.
WASPs and mosquitoes have allied against us!
If he ever gives a speech about rabies, I'm not going...
Rabies? I'm worried about an STD speech.
As I recall, the US economy got a boost from reduction in arms spending post-Communism, in the Clinton era. I remember discussions in the UK before that on how Japan benefited commercially from not having a significant military, meaning that not only did they not have to pay for it out of taxes, but engineers who might be making missiles could work on things like better cars.
There was the talk of the peace dividend we'd see after "winning" the Cold War but it never materialized. We're spending more now than ever on the military.
To generalise wildly, countries with large military R&D spending and manufacturing tend not to be good at consumer products. Military "GNP" is akin to making lots of expensive goods and then putting them all on a bonfire.
There was a good little book, The Rise and Fall of Great Powers (I think) and the author said there was a rule of thumb that could be seen through the nation-state era -- exceed a certain percentage of GDP spent on the military and see yourself become marginalized. Anyone who has played Civilization immediately grasps the principle here. Your have x resource units per turn. Your economy will grow at a rate of y and your military power at a rate of z. Too much money spent on the military, you end up not having an economy that can support it, not to mention you'll be driving around with obsolete weapons while your opponents have modern kit. Too little money spent on the military and your thriving cities will be snapped up by your militant neighbors. And it doesn't help that the bastard computer cheats.
The rule of thumb the author came up with was 5%. Keep it at or below that, your economy will keep up a reasonable rate of growth. Exceed that and you risk hollowing yourself out. He calculated that the Soviets were spending something like a third of their GDP on the military. The result is that they had a first world military by some standards but a third world economy that simply could not support it. An analogy would be the freakish weight-lifters who have so much muscle mass that their hearts are struggling just as bad as if the guy was a 500lb tub of lard.
The whole problem with the military-industrial complex is that there's too damn much money to be made in producing weapons. Get enough weapons lying around, people are inclined to use them.
This is a game we can't afford to play. The cost of wrecking satellites is trivially low compared to the cost of replacing them. I would put space warfare on the same level as chemical warfare, if not in terms of human cost but damage done to the treasury. In WWII, both sides had the gas masks in case the other side used it first but neither did for fear of the chemical counter-attack. And this is in a war where carpet-bombing cities was considered an acceptable tactic.
Here's a question: years ago I read that a poor man's ASAT would be a booster capable of reaching a retrograde orbit on the same orbit as the target. It doesn't contain a guided kinetic kill video, just a big bucket of sand. The sand is released after the orbit is circularized and it becomes a giant, fine-grained shotgun blast that will destroy any satellite on the same plane. Is this one of those hoary chestnuts that just isn't true or is it very plausible?
The other question which I know is serious and yet unanswered: how much shrapnel would be left from an unrestricted space war? Would we be denying ourselves the use of certain orbits for hundreds of years? Low earth orbits will see the junk slowed by the atmosphere and burn up in time but high orbits would be free from the drag and could be there indefinitely. Would it even be possible to armor satellites sufficiently to survive the debris or would we have screwed ourselves but good?
Christopher Hitchens will be so relieved.
Jerry Was a Man [wikipedia.org]
I thought he was a race car driver?
Video gamers are more geeky then Trekkies?
Depends on if you define "more geeky" as a good thing or a bad thing. The chart implies who looks down upon whom, note the direction the arrows point, both ways. Pokemon fans over the age of six still feel superior to furries and furries likewise feel superior to them.
Hierarchy of geekdom. Published scifi authors at the top, furries at the bottom, erotic furries below that.
http://www.brunching.com/geekhierarchy.html
The broadcasts catch the attention of entities it would be best to avoid.
If you look at the market, you see a lot of giveaways that used to be unthinkable. McDonalds is doing "free latte mondays" to draw business away from Starbucks while Denny's is giving away a free Grand Slam breakfast [dennys.com] to each visitor tomorrow in an attempt to push coupon books out to customers. (Thus encouraging them to think about the large and inexpensive breakfast they can get there.)
The key is that these businesses have solid revenue models that their giveaways promote. Web-based businesses are in a slightly tighter pickel. With advertising budgets getting slashed across the board, ad-supported websites are feeling the same pinch as print and broadcast media. Now is the time to find alternative revenue streams such as premium content to back their free services. Things like selling larger downloadable versions of free web games or state tax filings [taxact.com] to go with free Federal filings.
I think there's a difference between McDonalds giving away free hamburgers and Wikipedia. The summary makes a good point "an be produced and distributed at virtually no marginal cost, and so, by the laws of economics, price has gone the same way, to $0.00." but misses the totality of it. What the net does is remove intermediaries, the middle-men. If I write a book the cost of production is my own time, plus my editor's time. If I want to make $50k a year off of that, I need to sell some ungodly millions of dollars worth of that book because I'm paying for printing, warehousing, distribution, space on bookshelves, not to mention all of the inflated salaries and bonuses sucked up by the bloatworms in this whole process.
I'll move far less copies selling direct but I don't have to sell as many to earn a living. Will it be a tough gig? Hell, yeah, but it wasn't exactly easy to be a professional musician or writer back in the 60's, either.
I think what will really help move digital product is a greater feeling of connection with the creators. I wouldn't see the need to give any more money to the rapper running around with multi-million dollar contract, assuming I liked rap, but I'd want to support the little guy who's just starting out, I want to see more work from him.
The patronage model seems too altruistic to work in the real world but we're seeing signs that it really is possible.
Vista was shoved out the door too early without enough time to season. So for their second whack at it, which they've conveniently renamed to disguise the fact that it's a second whack, they're shoving it out the door too early without enough time to season. Consistency is a good thing but not when you're doing it wrong.
Was installing Chrome on my laptop and got that error message. "www.google.com/chrome may be malware!"
Gee, don't be so hard on yourself, Google. I'm sure you have some good points.
The funny thing is I googled "google everything is malware" to see if anyone else was noticing this. Yes, boards were indexed with the discussion but I had to manually cut and paste the urls to read threads.
I'm just pontificating here but I think we might not see the vast sweeping in of some new wholly dominant OS but a fragmentation of various solutions that work. A company might run a uniform platform just for IT's sake but that doesn't mean the company next door is running the same flavor.
I really like OSX but I don't think Apple is trying to position it for the corporate desktop. The friendly Linuxes like Ubuntu remain incredibly strong.
People have been predicting the era of the thinclient for years. Their arguments were compelling but nothing happened. There's advantages to having thick clients and you're simply not going to be able to deliver graphically-intensive content over the pipe, not for at least another generation or three.
My prediction for what might make sense (not that it will 100% happen but at least is plausible) is for businesses to go with thick client closed box PC's. The phone system is the model here. There's nothing to tweak inside a PC anymore. There's not really any such thing as computer repair. At most you have a hard drive go bad, rarely a stick of ram dies. For the most part any problem is going to be software.
What we're going to see is all-in-one PC's on the typical desktop, built like the new iMac with the computer sitting in the back of the monitor. (Though there will also be the option of connecting a pure thinclient to the same network.) Easy to install, easy to replace. It will have a custom linux install on it and can run apps either locally or via citrix windows. These all-in-one PC's will also have multiple video ports so that additional monitors can be driven from the same machine. Legacy Windows apps will run in Wine, complicated legacy apps will be served via the citrix or whatever server, and new apps will probably be developed for Linux but served out for the legacy Windows boxes. That's the situation we're in now with web appps acting as the platform-agnostic way of serving data to PC, Mac, Linux, phones, etc.
I think for the typical 20 person office there will be one server in the back room running everything, maybe a failover box duplicating all of the resources. The major apps are housed locally so that they can keep working in case of a network problem but it will all phone back to the main office for synchronizaiton. Database-driven apps will work along the Google Gears model where offline copies of recent data are stored on the client or at the location's server so that failover from network problems is seamless. And because telephony is all going to IP, your phone guys and your computer guys will eventually become the same guy, it'll all fall under the aegis of "office electronic stuff."
I think we're going to see much longer product upgrade cycles since there isn't a compelling reason to upgrade every 2-3 years. We might see terminals lasting happily for 8-10 years, maybe longer. There will still be big-box PC's in the office for those who need something special but that will be the exception.
Now just because this all seems reasonable that's not to say it'll happen this way. But I just see a migration away from Windows, it seems like Microsoft simply cannot innovate fast enough these days. (maybe wishful thinking, maybe not.)
We all live in a human-powered submarine,
human-powered submarine,
human-powered submarine!
Yes, the drugs are responsible for this album,
responsible for this album,
responsible for this album.
Suddenly being able to wipe out everything doesn't sound too difficult does it? From what I heard from friends- it was just a couple lines of shell, and it was discovered because there was a typo, and script to failed. Not a virus by any stretch.
That same scenario happened less than a year back at another company, a DBA was being fired for poor performance and he wrote a script to trash his company's databases and yup, typo. Looks like both these bozos were fired for cause: incompetence. :)
Either a laughing skull and bones or an animated version of him as a bobblehead that pisses off Samuel L. Jackson with his hacker crap?
Now Colin Humphreys's team at the University of Cambridge has discovered a simple solution to the shrinkage problem.
Excellent news! Wait, what's this story about?
Prostate stimulation.
And then there are british comedies that to my mind at least, have no redeeming value whatever. For example, Absolutely Fabulous, and Are You Being Served?.
I agree with you 100% on AbFab but Are You Being Served? You don't find that funny, not in the least bit, Hatta? I'm disappointed in you.