The key to containerization's success and current ubiquity was the development of size/length/connection standards in the 60s.
I had pondered this concept before -- even as a way to load people remotely at the airport -- but the chances of ever developing a standard that would work across aircraft manufacturers, models, classes (widebody) and carriers seems very remote. I could maybe see this as a limited extension of somebody's national rail system, but can't see it becoming ubiquitous.
This sounds nice in theory, but what is the actual rate of change/churn in large data centers once racks are populated and what are the potential labor savings over the long haul? What is the development cost of the robotic system and how long to amortize?
Seriously, we're talking about Boston, Massachusetts here. Get Jack on the horn and activate Citizens Against Government Waste. That'll fix those pesky Googlers!
"Ultimately this will be a case study in whether an individual bent on destruction can remain anonymous in an era of digital surveillance"
I would say that someone bent on destruction and bent on anonymity stands a very good chance of achieving both if they are canny and use commodity goods like pressure cookers, nails and match heads. I am preparing myself for the possibility that the perpetrator/s may never be identified. Depressing.
The nature of this thread disturbs me. That we somehow might get a jump on perceived opponents and/or frank miscreants with technology. What say Robert S, McNamara? Vietnam? Iraq, anyone?
During the late 70s I worked in an emergency room in Boston (my bittersweet home town). A regular visitor was a nervous, disturbing cop who had been farmed out to the graveyard shift after killing an innocent citizen, James Bowden, in Mission Hill. We had to put up with "Eddie" because we depended on the local police district when things got out of control.
But the number of criminal suspects (mostly minorities) they brought us who "fell down the stairs" never inspired confidence. As the city then waded through the racist swamp of the Charles Stuart case, that confidence only decreased. Police seemed much more interested in arresting "them" than solving crimes. I hear things have improved since I left Boston in the late 80s. I hope so.
So how about we put all of the technology in its proper perspective and lets see if the FBI and Boston PD can move beyond their checkered past and deliver some police work.
We very much appreciated our free use of VMWare Server and ESXi even though they were feature/hardware-constrained. And even when they were acquired by EMC and then put out insane pricing with vSphere 5, we bought some because we needed what they offered with that at the time.
But we are a small department and we just can't afford to pay what they are asking for licenses and support. We can't expand.
So, our answer in 2012-2013 is the KVM-based ProxMox VE (proxmox.com) and we are thrilled with what we are getting for free. The gap really *has* closed a lot and I think this article makes that plain. We have some vSphere we'll run for a while, but I'd be surprised if we had any VMWare at the end of 2014.
(and EMC, now that our OpenIndiana ZFS boxes have been humming for 6 months, our Celerra will be decommissioned in April)
Amazing. The review article compares their product with a Sony, which on principle I would never buy, but now these folks have cast themselves in the same vein. OK, maybe that haven't popped a rootkit on your computer, but seems like the same kind of crappy we-know-best attitude.
So, Go*ro does really stupid thing, generates lots of negative exposure with people who might be likely to buy their stuff, but who will now maybe look for something coming down the road that isn't a Sony or a Go*ro
I am looking at how many cookies and scripts NoScript thinks I need to OK in order to get the full BusinessInsider.com experience. As they say: *plonk*
It's difficult not to be ambivalent about some figures when it won't likely be possible to know all the facts for some time (if ever). In the Wikileaks realm , you might ask: What were Manning's motives? Does that matter? Has Manning caused harm? Has anyone demonstrated that? And Julian Assange. Nice guy or egotistical jerk? Does that matter? Is he a rapist or has he been set up? That matters, and I'd put the odds at 60-to-40 on the latter (an orchestrated extradition), but it is hard to hero worship when the odds are so poorly grounded in current-day fact.
That being said I want to thank Bradley Manning and Julian Assange.
I think my country (the USA) has been, for quite some time, suffering from what I would call "Band-of-Brothers Syndrome" or maybe "Private Ryan Disorder" where many folks have become content with the notion of American exceptionalism and the belief that our motives are pure. A few rough spots aside, we are the Spielbergian Good Guys.
To me, one antidote to "BBS" or "PRD" would be to have a required reading and viewing list for those so afflicted. It would certainly include Bilton and Sim's Four Hours in My Lai (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Hours_in_My_Lai) and now the very recent Kill Anything That Moves (http://killanythingthatmoves.tumblr.com/). But to be up to date it would most certainly need to include Wikileaks' Collateral Murder as required viewing. Based on my informal polling, an astonishing number of Americans, many of them suffering from BBS, have not seen this crucially important film. And they'd never have a chance of viewing this corrective if not for Bradley Manning.
So I want to thank Private Manning. Leavenworth is not a fun place and I suspect that you will be made to pay a very high price, regardless of your motives. I don't know that I admire you. But you have made a key contribution to an improved understanding of what our country can often be about. Thanks for that.
@jittles:"The fog of memory is a good thing, usually. It helps you to remember the things you really enjoy about your friends and family, and forget the things that really drive you nuts."
Wonderfully put. I have a sneaking suspicion that the OP is just going through a brief bout of meteor envy, but the idea seems like a terrible one. I have many pictures of friends and family that I enjoy looking at, but none of them involve someone sitting on the toilet, puking up Jagermeister or getting a boil lanced.
Oh, and +50 to the gent who said forget my life, let me record my dreams. I am much smarter, more creative and funnier when I finally make it to REM-land. I *really* wish that technology existed
Jim
'Tis the exceptional fellow who lies awake at night thinking of his successes.
Probably upwards of 20 times in the past year I have heard co-workers, acquaintances, relatives and others bleat "My Email Account Got Hacked!". These folks included AOL, Gmail and Hotmail users.
They didn't get hacked. They were naive. They got hoodwinked. They gave up information to some trojan or phishing email or keylogger. And, yes, meny were using the same weak or semi-weak password on multiple sites including their email and Facebook and Amazon and such. They were for the most part completely oblivious that doing that was a Bad Idea.
I am about as far from a Microsoft fan or apologist as it is reasonable to be. I'll also allow that there may be problems in the Hotmail and Live! monoculture (that I am not the world's expert on as I don't use them). But when I read the author admit that he used a fairly weak 7-character, all-lower-case password how can I give this story any credit? Doesn't sound like a very diligent techie to me. Rather, it makes me wonder where else he used that password.
I have to say that the general proposition -- "Ideas for a great control room?" -- makes me a bit nervous.
If I saw a post on Slashdot asking "Ideas for a Formula One race car?" or "Ideas for brain surgery?" I think I could be forgiven if I wondered if the folks asking the question/s were qualified to do so.
"Assuming that you have to rewrite his software, make it all web based"
Making things Web-based is a great general goal but is it worth it for a 2-node business system? Not likely.
And does it really need to be rewritten? If it is doing the job now, I'd look a little harder at the existing DOS spplication. If you discover that is some old dBaseIII-Plus (or Foxpro or Clipper) application, you might be able to just transplant it onto a Linux box with something like Flagship or Harbour.
You pose a great question, and something I have started to think about. My ISP would let me pay a sum in advance and that could let my on-line presence persist for years.
I will say, though, that I have been more concerned about how to load up some mega iPod so I could watch favorite movies as I decay and listen to certain favorite songs in an endless loop.
"There are plenty of reference managers for all platforms"
True. But I see lots of folks at my university who are addicted to EndNote's buggy "Cite While You Write" functions that provide MS-Word integration. RefWorks has an analogous "Write while you cite" function, but still lots of people have accumulated libraries in EndNote and still have a love/hate addiction to CWYW.
To make it worse, he negatives of this situation are not limited to EndNote but extend to Thomson-ISI's intent to maintain vertical lock-in. Our library provides ISI Web of Science on-line, but when you look at the licensing terms real hard it's abominable -- yes you can access these citations but don't think about really *using* them in any meaningful way (like citing them on your Web page). It's draconian.
So it feels like getting past EndNote to a more open alternative will require freeing up all elements of the stack to include citation repositories. I ask in earnest: is there an alternative vision for these? A combination of repositories, APIs and tools that would delivery a "free" citation/bib system from top to bottom?
I don't know why I believe this. It is probably just wishful thinking.
I think that any talk of the 'The Year of Linux on the Desktop' is a cruel joke until average users can plug in the average flatbed scanner and have a good shot at it working without any fiddling.
I consider myself a pretty sophisticated user but can't believe how much time I have lost to making scanners work. And not 'Brand X' either but HP and Epsons that are listed as 'complete' in SANE listings.
OK, my main box is now x86_64 and that complicates things, but that isn't the only hangup.
Venting a bit. Done now. Time to go back and crawl under/etc/udev.
I am a public employee working on this fine, beautiful holiday. One of my department's groups has a contractual obligation to test some software under Windows Vista. So we do have 1 machine (a brand-new Dell Optiplex 755) running Vista. After running that PC for a month, they have asked if I could make it into a dual-boot machine (so they could use XP most of the time, but still run Vista on an as-needed based). So, one of the things I am doing on this fine, beautiful holiday is to redo that machine.
I was having a hard time making the Vista boot loader (and EasyBCD) work in a 2-drive configuration, so I decided to perform a complete side-by-side reinstall of Vista and XP on a single drive.
I used the brown/maroon Vista reinstall CD provided by Dell. The install went fine. I was, however, astonished to discover that the Vista installation did not discover the Optiplex's NIC and about 5 other things. So, I would temper your assertions about "OEM copies". Dell. I have heard that they have some decent market share.
Slashdot Mirror
The key to containerization's success and current ubiquity was the development of size/length/connection standards in the 60s.
I had pondered this concept before -- even as a way to load people remotely at the airport -- but the chances of ever developing a standard that would work across aircraft manufacturers, models, classes (widebody) and carriers seems very remote. I could maybe see this as a limited extension of somebody's national rail system, but can't see it becoming ubiquitous .
This domain was registered as of last evening (by somebody else, privately).
I have some Free Edward Snowden bumper stickers coming from "makestickers.com".
Not very hopeful for this brave guy, though, and I generally think of bumper stickers as a cheap "feel good" sentiment. I just wanted to be proactive.
Of course, I'm not feeling so good right now. Just got an email from Barack Obama saying I could have save 40 percent if I had ordered 100 stickers.
This sounds nice in theory, but what is the actual rate of change/churn in large data centers once racks are populated and what are the potential labor savings over the long haul? What is the development cost of the robotic system and how long to amortize?
Seriously, we're talking about Boston, Massachusetts here. Get Jack on the horn and activate Citizens Against Government Waste. That'll fix those pesky Googlers!
"Ultimately this will be a case study in whether an individual bent on destruction can remain anonymous in an era of digital surveillance"
I would say that someone bent on destruction and bent on anonymity stands a very good chance of achieving both if they are canny and use commodity goods like pressure cookers, nails and match heads. I am preparing myself for the possibility that the perpetrator/s may never be identified. Depressing.
The nature of this thread disturbs me. That we somehow might get a jump on perceived opponents and/or frank miscreants with technology. What say Robert S, McNamara? Vietnam? Iraq, anyone?
During the late 70s I worked in an emergency room in Boston (my bittersweet home town). A regular visitor was a nervous, disturbing cop who had been farmed out to the graveyard shift after killing an innocent citizen, James Bowden, in Mission Hill. We had to put up with "Eddie" because we depended on the local police district when things got out of control.
But the number of criminal suspects (mostly minorities) they brought us who "fell down the stairs" never inspired confidence. As the city then waded through the racist swamp of the Charles Stuart case, that confidence only decreased. Police seemed much more interested in arresting "them" than solving crimes. I hear things have improved since I left Boston in the late 80s. I hope so.
So how about we put all of the technology in its proper perspective and lets see if the FBI and Boston PD can move beyond their checkered past and deliver some police work.
We very much appreciated our free use of VMWare Server and ESXi even though they were feature/hardware-constrained. And even when they were acquired by EMC and then put out insane pricing with vSphere 5, we bought some because we needed what they offered with that at the time.
But we are a small department and we just can't afford to pay what they are asking for licenses and support. We can't expand.
So, our answer in 2012-2013 is the KVM-based ProxMox VE (proxmox.com) and we are thrilled with what we are getting for free. The gap really *has* closed a lot and I think this article makes that plain. We have some vSphere we'll run for a while, but I'd be surprised if we had any VMWare at the end of 2014.
(and EMC, now that our OpenIndiana ZFS boxes have been humming for 6 months, our Celerra will be decommissioned in April)
Amazing. The review article compares their product with a Sony, which on principle I would never buy, but now these folks have cast themselves in the same vein. OK, maybe that haven't popped a rootkit on your computer, but seems like the same kind of crappy we-know-best attitude.
So, Go*ro does really stupid thing, generates lots of negative exposure with people who might be likely to buy their stuff, but who will now maybe look for something coming down the road that isn't a Sony or a Go*ro
Fine business minds.
I am looking at how many cookies and scripts NoScript thinks I need to OK in order to get the full BusinessInsider.com experience. As they say: *plonk*
It's difficult not to be ambivalent about some figures when it won't likely be possible to know all the facts for some time (if ever). In the Wikileaks realm , you might ask: What were Manning's motives? Does that matter? Has Manning caused harm? Has anyone demonstrated that? And Julian Assange. Nice guy or egotistical jerk? Does that matter? Is he a rapist or has he been set up? That matters, and I'd put the odds at 60-to-40 on the latter (an orchestrated extradition), but it is hard to hero worship when the odds are so poorly grounded in current-day fact.
That being said I want to thank Bradley Manning and Julian Assange.
I think my country (the USA) has been, for quite some time, suffering from what I would call "Band-of-Brothers Syndrome" or maybe "Private Ryan Disorder" where many folks have become content with the notion of American exceptionalism and the belief that our motives are pure. A few rough spots aside, we are the Spielbergian Good Guys.
To me, one antidote to "BBS" or "PRD" would be to have a required reading and viewing list for those so afflicted. It would certainly include Bilton and Sim's Four Hours in My Lai (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Hours_in_My_Lai) and now the very recent Kill Anything That Moves (http://killanythingthatmoves.tumblr.com/). But to be up to date it would most certainly need to include Wikileaks' Collateral Murder as required viewing. Based on my informal polling, an astonishing number of Americans, many of them suffering from BBS, have not seen this crucially important film. And they'd never have a chance of viewing this corrective if not for Bradley Manning.
So I want to thank Private Manning. Leavenworth is not a fun place and I suspect that you will be made to pay a very high price, regardless of your motives. I don't know that I admire you. But you have made a key contribution to an improved understanding of what our country can often be about. Thanks for that.
@jittles:"The fog of memory is a good thing, usually. It helps you to remember the things you really enjoy about your friends and family, and forget the things that really drive you nuts."
Wonderfully put. I have a sneaking suspicion that the OP is just going through a brief bout of meteor envy, but the idea seems like a terrible one. I have many pictures of friends and family that I enjoy looking at, but none of them involve someone sitting on the toilet, puking up Jagermeister or getting a boil lanced.
Oh, and +50 to the gent who said forget my life, let me record my dreams. I am much smarter, more creative and funnier when I finally make it to REM-land. I *really* wish that technology existed
Jim
'Tis the exceptional fellow who lies awake at night thinking of his successes.
Sharing concerns about the trend toward gated communities and loss of choices and freedom, I was very eager to read Anil's blog post.
Sadly, while the muted violet-and-grey theme may be very stylish and tasteful, I find that its lack of contrast makes in nearly impossible to read.
I love Lynx, but is that what I need to resort to on the World Wide Web to understand the points that Web advocates are trying to make?
I mean, really. Didn't Mitt ever see Goldfinger???
Imagine if McDonalds broke into the sushi market, dumped into the market to put all independent sushi shops out of business, ....
This doesn't seem like a very good analogy. I don't think Sun Myung Moon would let this happen given his lock on the sushi supply chain in the U.S.A.
Hmmmm. Maybe Moon will buy MacDonalds and we will have much-improved Blissfully Happy Sushi Meals!
Probably upwards of 20 times in the past year I have heard co-workers, acquaintances, relatives and others bleat "My Email Account Got Hacked!". These folks included AOL, Gmail and Hotmail users.
They didn't get hacked. They were naive. They got hoodwinked. They gave up information to some trojan or phishing email or keylogger. And, yes, meny were using the same weak or semi-weak password on multiple sites including their email and Facebook and Amazon and such. They were for the most part completely oblivious that doing that was a Bad Idea.
I am about as far from a Microsoft fan or apologist as it is reasonable to be. I'll also allow that there may be problems in the Hotmail and Live! monoculture (that I am not the world's expert on as I don't use them). But when I read the author admit that he used a fairly weak 7-character, all-lower-case password how can I give this story any credit? Doesn't sound like a very diligent techie to me. Rather, it makes me wonder where else he used that password.
Look at the free SPSS work-alike PSPP. http://www.gnu.org/software/pspp/ Sounds like R might be a bit much for your needs.
I have to say that the general proposition -- "Ideas for a great control room?" -- makes me a bit nervous.
If I saw a post on Slashdot asking "Ideas for a Formula One race car?" or "Ideas for brain surgery?" I think I could be forgiven if I wondered if the folks asking the question/s were qualified to do so.
Jim
I use Bing for entertainment. I enjoy going over and typing in "abramoff microsoft cagw" or "abramoff microsoft cagw massachusetts".
"Assuming that you have to rewrite his software, make it all web based"
Making things Web-based is a great general goal but is it worth it for a 2-node business system? Not likely.
And does it really need to be rewritten? If it is doing the job now, I'd look a little harder at the existing DOS spplication. If you discover that is some old dBaseIII-Plus (or Foxpro or Clipper) application, you might be able to just transplant it onto a Linux box with something like Flagship or Harbour.
If we are voting, I vote for Castrix
-- Terry
try "Cuba Libre"
You pose a great question, and something I have started to think about. My ISP would let me pay a sum in advance and that could let my on-line presence persist for years.
I will say, though, that I have been more concerned about how to load up some mega iPod so I could watch favorite movies as I decay and listen to certain favorite songs in an endless loop.
Gericaching: http://www.lanalt.org/blog/index.php?entry=entry081126-035220
"There are plenty of reference managers for all platforms"
True. But I see lots of folks at my university who are addicted to EndNote's buggy "Cite While You Write" functions that provide MS-Word integration. RefWorks has an analogous "Write while you cite" function, but still lots of people have accumulated libraries in EndNote and still have a love/hate addiction to CWYW.
To make it worse, he negatives of this situation are not limited to EndNote but extend to Thomson-ISI's intent to maintain vertical lock-in. Our library provides ISI Web of Science on-line, but when you look at the licensing terms real hard it's abominable -- yes you can access these citations but don't think about really *using* them in any meaningful way (like citing them on your Web page). It's draconian.
So it feels like getting past EndNote to a more open alternative will require freeing up all elements of the stack to include citation repositories. I ask in earnest: is there an alternative vision for these? A combination of repositories, APIs and tools that would delivery a "free" citation/bib system from top to bottom?
I can help you out. When are you thinking of having it? What's the street address?
I don't know why I believe this. It is probably just wishful thinking.
I think that any talk of the 'The Year of Linux on the Desktop' is a cruel joke until average users can plug in the average flatbed scanner and have a good shot at it working without any fiddling.
I consider myself a pretty sophisticated user but can't believe how much time I have lost to making scanners work. And not 'Brand X' either but HP and Epsons that are listed as 'complete' in SANE listings.
OK, my main box is now x86_64 and that complicates things, but that isn't the only hangup.
Venting a bit. Done now. Time to go back and crawl under /etc/udev.
It should have been "Wicked Pissah PHP"
I am a public employee working on this fine, beautiful holiday. One of my department's groups has a contractual obligation to test some software under Windows Vista. So we do have 1 machine (a brand-new Dell Optiplex 755) running Vista. After running that PC for a month, they have asked if I could make it into a dual-boot machine (so they could use XP most of the time, but still run Vista on an as-needed based). So, one of the things I am doing on this fine, beautiful holiday is to redo that machine.
I was having a hard time making the Vista boot loader (and EasyBCD) work in a 2-drive configuration, so I decided to perform a complete side-by-side reinstall of Vista and XP on a single drive.
I used the brown/maroon Vista reinstall CD provided by Dell. The install went fine. I was, however, astonished to discover that the Vista installation did not discover the Optiplex's NIC and about 5 other things. So, I would temper your assertions about "OEM copies". Dell. I have heard that they have some decent market share.