What needs to happen is the one that provides the connection to the house should not provide the service. The government then regulates the infrastructure provider/maintainers. The service providers then sit on that infrastructure.
For example, here in Utah we have UTOPIA (Utah Telecommunication Open Infrastructure Agency, http://www.utopianet.org/). UTOPIA themselves provide the fiber to the premise. Then you sign up with the providers on the network. There are a handful of different ISPs that provide service over it (including Qwest!). You can choose based on whatever meets your fancy. ISP too oversubscribed? Choose another one.
The fiber delivers internet, phone, and tv. Here at my office we have a symmetric 30Mbs connection for about $110. Makes me hate to go home to my Comcast connection...
The problem is the only motivation for the infrastructure provider is to keep the ISPs and governments to off their backs. The government should own the infrastructure and then private companies should compete for the maintenance contracts. Hopefully somebody in the city knows something about an SLA.../br
You forgot: (c) either they obtain a separate license from each of the original programmers, distribute under the GPL (which requires them to GPL their code), or stop distributing their product.
(From the archives. Don't know who the original author is...)
Microsoft Conducts Nuclear Testing
REDMOND (BNN)--World leaders reacted with stunned silence as Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) conducted an underground nuclear test at a secret facility in eastern Washington state. The device, exploded at 9:22 am PDT (1622 GMT/12:22 pm EDT) today, was timed to coincide with talks between Microsoft and the US Department of Justice over possible antitrust action.
"Microsoft is going to defend its right to market its products by any and all necessary means," said Microsoft CEO Bill Gates. "Not that I'm anti-government" he continued, "but there would be few tears shed in the computer industry if Washington were engulfed in a bath of nuclear fire."
Scientists pegged the explosion at around 100 kilotons. "I nearly dropped my latte when I saw the seismometer" explained University of Washington geophysicist Dr. Whoops Blammover, "At first I thought it was Mt. Rainier, and I was thinking, damn, there goes the mountain bike vacation."
In Washington, President Clinton announced the US Government would boycott all Microsoft products indefinitely. Minutes later, the President reversed his decision. "We've tried sanctions since lunchtime, and they don't work," said the President. Instead, the administration will initiate a policy of "constructive engagement" with Microsoft.
Microsoft's Chief Technology Officer Nathan Myrhvold said the test justified Microsoft's recent acquisition of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation from the US Government. Not only did Microsoft acquire "kilograms of weapons grade plutonium" in the deal, said Myrhvold, "but we've finally found a place to dump those millions of unsold copies of Microsoft Bob." Myrhvold warned users not to replace Microsoft NT products with rival operating systems. "I can neither confirm nor deny the existence of a radioisotope thermoelectric generator inside of every Pentium II microprocessor," said Myrhvold, "but anyone who installs an OS written by a bunch of long-hairs on the Internet is going to get what they deserve."
The existence of an RTG in each Pentium II microprocessor would explain why the microprocessors, made by the Intel Corporation, run so hot. The Intel chips "put out more heat than they draw in electrical power" said Prof. E. Thymes of MIT. "This should finally dispell those stories about cold fusion."
Rumors suggest a second weapons development project is underway in California, headed by Microsoft rival Sun Microsystems. "They're doing all of the development work in Java," said one source close to the project. The development of a delivery system is said to be holding up progress. "Write once, bomb anywhere is still a dream at the moment."
Meanwhile, in Cupertino, California, Apple interim-CEO Steve Jobs was rumored to be in discussion with Oracle CEO Larry Ellison about deploying Apple's Newton technology against Microsoft. "Newton was the biggest bomb the Valley has developed in years," said one hardware engineer. "I'd hate to be around when they drop that product a second time."
He's blaming greedy people. You can be poor and greedy at the same time. Taking a loan that is beyond your means to repay is greedy. Offering high interest/adjustable rate loans to people who wont be able to repay them is also greedy. Greed is one of the roots of all this, and it doesn't rest in just one group.
I totally agree that the financial institutions should pay for their mistakes and irresponsibility, but the truth of the matter is that they need to be bailed out or the entire county is going to be in serious financial trouble. For example, last week the bank systems did seize up. Banks had reached their minimum liquidity ratios and _NOBODY_ was able to make any loans. This has pretty much never happened before. Lack of financing will absolutely kill this country. Thankfully, there was some quick action to unlock everything, but there are still issues. It was bad enough that the democrats in congress finally realized that something needed to be done immediately and they are finally working with republicans to remedy the situation.
Most of the year in the northern hemisphere the sun is more southerly than northerly. The opposite is true in the southern hemisphere. Perhaps they don't like the sun in their eyes?
Mine actually worked great until I updated to 2.0.2. I should have held off. Now my keyboard sticks and my calls get dropped. I don't know what I was thinking...
I think you you missed the point. What I gathered from the article was that there was no longer a need for the server admins be located physically near the servers--it all can be done remotely.
In the context of the rest of the commentary, he's saying that an outsourced data center can manage the physical boxes, while sys admins can manage the "virtual boxes" remotely. That's not really a new concept except that it is becoming increasingly viable as the processing power of servers continue to advance. So the hardware administration will be outsourced while the software continues to be maintained in-house.
I'm with you, though, computers are here to stay in businesses.
...but to me it sounds similar to the effect you get when you spin a wheel. You get a force perpendicular to the axis of the wheel. Its like the experiment you did in high school where someone spun a bicycle wheel while standing on a rotatable platform. As they changed the angle of the spinning bicycle wheel it caused the the person on the platform to accelerate their rotational velocity. Maybe the rotation of the earth is some how providing rotational acceleration.
He isn't saying that companies shouldn't invest in IT, he's saying that a company cannot create a long term strategic advantage over another company simply through IT infrastructure. He feels that the nature of IT makes it very to replicate things between companies.
Consider technology companies and you will see this is true. Apple for example, is well known for their high quality technology products. However, it seems that within months of them releasing their next hot product, some company has made some kind of knock off. Apple is successful afterward because of their brand. It has a certain image that people buy into that can't be replicated. So Apple's strategic advantage is in their brand, not in their technologies. They maintain their brand by continually releasing hot new products.
Google is similar. After Google became successful, everyone and their dog started copying their advertising model and their cool apps. Google remains a leader because of the brand it built and the following it created. While Google's products are cool, they are not the most superior out there. I argue that for them, it is also the brand that gives them most of their value.
Now, if you consider this idea in light of the open source software movement, his opinion is even more compelling. In the long run, the cost of software will approach $0. This doesn't mean that it will cost $0 to run and maintain it, just that the costs will become very uniform throughout different industries.
There will always be needs for custom software, but if that need exists, it will be throughout the industry you are competing in. This makes it a matter of operational effectiveness and less about strategy.
I wouldn't go as far as he does in saying that the IT department isn't necessary, but I think that many companies do things in-house when they should really be outsourced./br
I think the market could find something much more efficient than health care that would more than offset the effect on the economy. Your argument reminds me of the broken window fallacy. Wasting money in health care is like breaking windows and saying that it's providing jobs. Sure, but fixing that window is just taking resources away from better endeavors.
1. Nonstandard, proprietary Available on 99% of machines, 93% on flash 9. (http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/flashplayer/version_penetration.html). It's not a standard, but in all practicality is. Sure something open source and standards based would be preferred. However, I feel better about developing for flash than I do for ActiveX
2. Not easily indexed by search engines True, but indexing may not be important to you, based on what kind of internet application you are developing.
3. Does not work consistently in all browsers It's seems more consistent than HTML... and it's a vendor that is at least seeking consistency.
4. Does not work in text-mode browsers Well, images don't work there either. And how many people use a text based browser.
5. Does not work with text-to-speech browsers for the blind/disabled Things are getting better...
6. Does not have cross-version compatibility with its own plugins So you are complaining that they are making features and that you can't use those features with older versions of the plug in?
7. Buggy and inconsistent
Granted.
While it's not perfect, Flash does provide a very viable, cost effective solution. While it's great to try to bolster philosophical values, we still have to make a living. I'll stick with the convenience that Flash provides me and my users, thanks.
You could further reduce load by setting up a torrent style peer-to-peer network among those in the region and leave the actual processing of actions and rules to the server.
What you need is a double check system that would require a more sophisticated hack to overcome:
You have two machines, one that the voter does that actual voting at and another that verifies. After voting, this machine prints two cards with the voters choices in a way that is machine and human readable. At the bottom of the card is a signature hash of the voters choices and some vote id number.
When the voter goes to leave, they feed one of the cards into a machine that reads the votes and then verifies against the signature. The machine keeps one of the cards in case a manual count is for some reason required. At the end, the data from both the voting and verifying machine are compared. Only the votes that show up on both machines are counted.
What they need to do is instead of caching it locally, they should have set top boxes with large hard drives running bit torrent. Then bit torrent style, distribute the content to the customers. So instead of caching it near your customers, you cache it with your customers.
This works great, because all the customers are near each other. You would also seed the content centrally, but you wouldn't need gobs of bandwidth from the central office to the customer, just between the customers.
Too bad ISPs are starting to throttle Bit Torrent--it really is a solution, not a problem./br
Slashdot Mirror
What needs to happen is the one that provides the connection to the house should not provide the service. The government then regulates the infrastructure provider/maintainers. The service providers then sit on that infrastructure.
For example, here in Utah we have UTOPIA (Utah Telecommunication Open Infrastructure Agency, http://www.utopianet.org/). UTOPIA themselves provide the fiber to the premise. Then you sign up with the providers on the network. There are a handful of different ISPs that provide service over it (including Qwest!). You can choose based on whatever meets your fancy. ISP too oversubscribed? Choose another one.
The fiber delivers internet, phone, and tv. Here at my office we have a symmetric 30Mbs connection for about $110. Makes me hate to go home to my Comcast connection...
The problem is the only motivation for the infrastructure provider is to keep the ISPs and governments to off their backs. The government should own the infrastructure and then private companies should compete for the maintenance contracts. Hopefully somebody in the city knows something about an SLA... /br
Would they call it SunHat or RedSun?
Or just use the arrows to select the entry and hit delete.
br/
You forgot: (c) either they obtain a separate license from each of the original programmers, distribute under the GPL (which requires them to GPL their code), or stop distributing their product.
br/
(From the archives. Don't know who the original author is...)
Microsoft Conducts Nuclear Testing
REDMOND (BNN)--World leaders reacted with stunned silence as Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) conducted an underground nuclear test at a secret facility in eastern Washington state. The device, exploded at 9:22 am PDT (1622 GMT/12:22 pm EDT) today, was timed to coincide with talks between Microsoft and the US Department of Justice over possible antitrust action.
"Microsoft is going to defend its right to market its products by any and all necessary means," said Microsoft CEO Bill Gates. "Not that I'm anti-government" he continued, "but there would be few tears shed in the computer industry if Washington were engulfed in a bath of nuclear fire."
Scientists pegged the explosion at around 100 kilotons. "I nearly dropped my latte when I saw the seismometer" explained University of Washington geophysicist Dr. Whoops Blammover, "At first I thought it was Mt. Rainier, and I was thinking, damn, there goes the mountain bike vacation."
In Washington, President Clinton announced the US Government would boycott all Microsoft products indefinitely. Minutes later, the President reversed his decision. "We've tried sanctions since lunchtime, and they don't work," said the President. Instead, the administration will initiate a policy of "constructive engagement" with Microsoft.
Microsoft's Chief Technology Officer Nathan Myrhvold said the test justified Microsoft's recent acquisition of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation from the US Government. Not only did Microsoft acquire "kilograms of weapons grade plutonium" in the deal, said Myrhvold, "but we've finally found a place to dump those millions of unsold copies of Microsoft Bob." Myrhvold warned users not to replace Microsoft NT products with rival operating systems. "I can neither confirm nor deny the existence of a radioisotope thermoelectric generator inside of every Pentium II microprocessor," said Myrhvold, "but anyone who installs an OS written by a bunch of long-hairs on the Internet is going to get what they deserve."
The existence of an RTG in each Pentium II microprocessor would explain why the microprocessors, made by the Intel Corporation, run so hot. The Intel chips "put out more heat than they draw in electrical power" said Prof. E. Thymes of MIT. "This should finally dispell those stories about cold fusion."
Rumors suggest a second weapons development project is underway in California, headed by Microsoft rival Sun Microsystems. "They're doing all of the development work in Java," said one source close to the project. The development of a delivery system is said to be holding up progress. "Write once, bomb anywhere is still a dream at the moment."
Meanwhile, in Cupertino, California, Apple interim-CEO Steve Jobs was rumored to be in discussion with Oracle CEO Larry Ellison about deploying Apple's Newton technology against Microsoft. "Newton was the biggest bomb the Valley has developed in years," said one hardware engineer. "I'd hate to be around when they drop that product a second time."
He's blaming greedy people. You can be poor and greedy at the same time. Taking a loan that is beyond your means to repay is greedy. Offering high interest/adjustable rate loans to people who wont be able to repay them is also greedy. Greed is one of the roots of all this, and it doesn't rest in just one group.
Greed: excessive desire to acquire or possess more (especially more material wealth) than one needs or deserves
http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=greed
br
I totally agree that the financial institutions should pay for their mistakes and irresponsibility, but the truth of the matter is that they need to be bailed out or the entire county is going to be in serious financial trouble. For example, last week the bank systems did seize up. Banks had reached their minimum liquidity ratios and _NOBODY_ was able to make any loans. This has pretty much never happened before. Lack of financing will absolutely kill this country. Thankfully, there was some quick action to unlock everything, but there are still issues. It was bad enough that the democrats in congress finally realized that something needed to be done immediately and they are finally working with republicans to remedy the situation.
br/
Well said. +1 Informative (if i had mod points)
Most of the year in the northern hemisphere the sun is more southerly than northerly. The opposite is true in the southern hemisphere. Perhaps they don't like the sun in their eyes?
br/
Mine actually worked great until I updated to 2.0.2. I should have held off. Now my keyboard sticks and my calls get dropped. I don't know what I was thinking...
br/
I think you you missed the point. What I gathered from the article was that there was no longer a need for the server admins be located physically near the servers--it all can be done remotely.
In the context of the rest of the commentary, he's saying that an outsourced data center can manage the physical boxes, while sys admins can manage the "virtual boxes" remotely. That's not really a new concept except that it is becoming increasingly viable as the processing power of servers continue to advance. So the hardware administration will be outsourced while the software continues to be maintained in-house.
I'm with you, though, computers are here to stay in businesses.
br/
it's dia-Rhea?
...yeah, I said it. yeah it's missing an 'r'.
rings + Rhea = diameter + Rhea ~= diarhea
or death to rhea or die-rhea?
ok, sorry...back to the basement....
br/
...but to me it sounds similar to the effect you get when you spin a wheel. You get a force perpendicular to the axis of the wheel. Its like the experiment you did in high school where someone spun a bicycle wheel while standing on a rotatable platform. As they changed the angle of the spinning bicycle wheel it caused the the person on the platform to accelerate their rotational velocity. Maybe the rotation of the earth is some how providing rotational acceleration.
br/
+1 if i had the mod points
Remember, before you eat, make a backup!
br/
He isn't saying that companies shouldn't invest in IT, he's saying that a company cannot create a long term strategic advantage over another company simply through IT infrastructure. He feels that the nature of IT makes it very to replicate things between companies.
/br
Consider technology companies and you will see this is true. Apple for example, is well known for their high quality technology products. However, it seems that within months of them releasing their next hot product, some company has made some kind of knock off. Apple is successful afterward because of their brand. It has a certain image that people buy into that can't be replicated. So Apple's strategic advantage is in their brand, not in their technologies. They maintain their brand by continually releasing hot new products.
Google is similar. After Google became successful, everyone and their dog started copying their advertising model and their cool apps. Google remains a leader because of the brand it built and the following it created. While Google's products are cool, they are not the most superior out there. I argue that for them, it is also the brand that gives them most of their value.
Now, if you consider this idea in light of the open source software movement, his opinion is even more compelling. In the long run, the cost of software will approach $0. This doesn't mean that it will cost $0 to run and maintain it, just that the costs will become very uniform throughout different industries.
There will always be needs for custom software, but if that need exists, it will be throughout the industry you are competing in. This makes it a matter of operational effectiveness and less about strategy.
I wouldn't go as far as he does in saying that the IT department isn't necessary, but I think that many companies do things in-house when they should really be outsourced.
I think the market could find something much more efficient than health care that would more than offset the effect on the economy. Your argument reminds me of the broken window fallacy. Wasting money in health care is like breaking windows and saying that it's providing jobs. Sure, but fixing that window is just taking resources away from better endeavors.
/br
Google doesn't want to be the infrastructure for information transferral, they want to be the index/gateway/portal to the worlds information...
They're building the hitchhikers' guide to the galaxy device.
br/
We're in Orem, UT on the UTOPIA network and we get 30 up/30 down on fiber for $110 a month...
I would like to be the first to thank our Anonymous Coward Heroes!
br/
Granted.
While it's not perfect, Flash does provide a very viable, cost effective solution. While it's great to try to bolster philosophical values, we still have to make a living. I'll stick with the convenience that Flash provides me and my users, thanks.
br/
You could further reduce load by setting up a torrent style peer-to-peer network among those in the region and leave the actual processing of actions and rules to the server.
What you need is a double check system that would require a more sophisticated hack to overcome:
You have two machines, one that the voter does that actual voting at and another that verifies. After voting, this machine prints two cards with the voters choices in a way that is machine and human readable. At the bottom of the card is a signature hash of the voters choices and some vote id number.
When the voter goes to leave, they feed one of the cards into a machine that reads the votes and then verifies against the signature. The machine keeps one of the cards in case a manual count is for some reason required. At the end, the data from both the voting and verifying machine are compared. Only the votes that show up on both machines are counted.
br/
What are the consequences if Microsoft is shown to be a distributor under GPLv3?
What they need to do is instead of caching it locally, they should have set top boxes with large hard drives running bit torrent. Then bit torrent style, distribute the content to the customers. So instead of caching it near your customers, you cache it with your customers.
/br
This works great, because all the customers are near each other. You would also seed the content centrally, but you wouldn't need gobs of bandwidth from the central office to the customer, just between the customers.
Too bad ISPs are starting to throttle Bit Torrent--it really is a solution, not a problem.