I have to say... I started playing with linux ~15 years ago... those were dark days... I remember working install fests where we struggled to get linux to install and drivers for video cards and sound cards were spotty at best.
Now? I PXE boot to the installer of my choice, press a couple of buttons or have the installer pointed at some automated install file, close my eyes and ~10 minutes later I can be reasonably assured that I'll have a fully functional linux machine.
I've got a number of linux and window desktop machines. Based on the number of tickets submitted to RT for issues, in terms of ROI, right now linux is totally winning.
Apparently these hacks missed the whole DVR revolution? They never ever heard of slingbox?
As far as I can recognize TV viewers fall into the following categories.
* Traditional TV watchers who structure their lives around watching specific shows at a specific time. * DVR TV watchers who sit down and watch a previously recorded show. Maybe at some specific time (such as after the kids are in bed, etc) maybe not. * Content consumers who watch their show of choice on their device of choice, may it be a tablet, laptop, smartphone, etc.
It's quite possible there's a Venn diagram of the latter two.
The executives want the first kind, stubbornly tolerate the second kind and absolutely hate the third kind (it would appear). What it comes down to is that their revenue model is breaking and they can't adapt fast enough.
I'm of the opinion that we need to move to an ala-carte system where you'd pay for the channels you want.
I've long argued that Itanium was Intel's vehicle to kill PA-RISC and get HP out of the high performance computing market and it worked. Intel let that CPU die a death of a thousand committee compromises while simultaneously plundering all of the technology they could out of Alpha and rolling out their Xeon cpus out at much higher clock speeds and with features that weren't in Itanium.
I worked at a computer company and we built servers that used PA-RISC cpus at the time and we got our hands on some Itanium samples and needless to say, we decided to migrate the platform to Xeon instead.
Here's what I want to know... Were these satellites built with provisions (such as connectors/etc) to allow for in orbit refueling? If so, it seems perfectly reasonable to have a small spacecraft mosey up to the satellite and give it a top off. However, once you start cutting into the thermal blankets to expose the fuel lines, I have to wonder what their success rate is going to be. I have to imagine if they're embarking on this adventure they've figured out how to do this with some reasonable rate of success. Also I have to imagine this option would only really be entertained for a spacecraft that's near it's end of useful life due to fuel shortage.
As someone who spends a lot of time up in the White Mountains, practically every group of hikers carries a FRS radio. Practically every channel and subchannel is busy with chatter. You hear lots of conversations that go something like:
"Hey, everybody in hiking group X, switch to channel 4, subchannel 5" and then you'll hear "Nope, we're on 4.5, try 10.2"
I've come to the conclusion this guy's a nitwit. Though considering the lobby that the defence contractors have in Washington, this proposal will get no where.
Firstly, I'm a fan of playing rather out of date games. It'll really suck when I go to save my game and in fact I can't because that cloud resource is long gone. This sounds like yet another way Sony can obsolete games out of their catalogue to keep them off the resale market.
Secondly, I'm leary of Sony eventually turning this into a for pay service and then holding a virtual gun to my game saves. <mobster voice> "Pay up or your Rachet and Clank save is gonna have an accident with/dev/null..."</mobster voice> There's been some talk about keying video games because DRM schemes on consoles have proven vulnerable. I can only imagine a situation where Sony just makes every game with an embedded serial number. Your cloud account would have both the serial numbers of your consoles and the games you own. Give your game to your buddy to play? Nope... the games keyed to your account. Or possibly it could come up in the game and say "This game is owned by X, you can play but you can't save"
Honestly, I expect this behaviour from downloaded games. I understand I can't copy it 1000 times. However, for physical media, there shouldn't be such limitations. (Yes, I know people copy physical games).
My wife also got droid envy and ended up with a HTC Eris and she loves it.
Here's my take on this argument. It's really all about choice. Even though we've got two Android phones in the house, I've never upgraded either. What bothers me is a company purposely engineering my personal choice out of the equation. If I'm spending ~$300 on a phone, I better have the ability to modify/upgrade it at my leisure.
I can slightly understand my cell provider being twitchy about zillions of users suddenly running possibly sketchy versions of software on their network.
However, when a company takes choice out of my hands, they've lost my business.
They said these house robots were all 3 laws compliment, yet it seems every time a law firm tries to sue one of these robot companies most of the staff dies from "accidents".
Take Mr. Jenkins. Not one day after he filed suit against "US Robotics" wouldn't you know they found him in bed with his skull caved in by a frying pan. Apparently in what the technicians are calling a "glitch" the robot confused his head for the dishwasher.
Capcom is just saddened they got caught... No worries if it sells enough copies, Apple will in turn copy it and then ban the original from their application store!
"Listen up... we've been live for about a year and this shit it getting old. I was really hoping to sell this whole adventure for a tidy profit and get the fuck out of dodge... So... I'm gonna need ya to come in on Saturdays... In fact come in on Sundays as well... Since you have no stake in the company you are expendable and the moment the ink is dry on the purchase and sale expect to be shown the door with zero fan fair. Now get your asses to work and make me a {million,billion}aire!"
I find it rather scary that your boss is so clueless on how to grow the business that he's grasping at straws. I guess the whole concept of actually talking to your customers and perspective customers on what improvements they'd like in the product must seem crazy.
Well the deal would be like this. I'd be a holder of the data, but I wouldn't hold any of the keys. Sure, try and come to steal the data, it won't do you any good.
As for being well armed, that's a given. Anything that even looks hostile would be riddled with bullets at 5 miles from a mark 45.
Expect the decks to be clear of anything that provides cover and swept frequently with remotely controlled automatic gun fire.
My optimum boat for this would be a medium size cargo ship capable of running on diesel.
One hold would be converted to a state of the art computer room.
Another hold would contain all the machinery of a thermal depolymerization plant. I'd also rig the boat with outboard skimmers so I could skirt the edges of the giant plastic patch in the Pacific and convert the plastic into oil to fire the engines and run the generators.
A third hold would be converted into a tanker space to hold spare oil. I could then sell excess as profit.
I figure this way I can keep the worlds data safe and do it in an semi-ecological manner.
Firstly, law enforcement isn't stupid. They know that your first phone call will be to someone who can remote wipe the device. Hence the first thing they'll do is slip your phone into a Faraday box.
Secondly, what data do you have on your phone that you don't have backup up somewhere else? Your contacts? Your email? If you think in a second that Apple or Google won't just hand over your data without blinking, you're mad. Even if it's encrypted on the device, it'll be somewhere else possibly in plain text.
You need a secure device that has everything encrypted. You need a duress password that will destroy the device upon entering.
You need to have your data stored in a location and place where it's both encrypted and also out of the jurisdiction of [insert federal law enforcement agency of your choice]
I know it sounds a bit crazy, but I think you could make a business case for a data haven that was ship based that would sit in international waters out of the reach of the FBI/CIA/NSA/* would be unable to get to it.
We have both where I work and it breaks down into what they're going to be using it for.
If you're setting up a training center and you want an utterly locked down environment, thin clients make tons of sense. Reception desk, security desk, cleaning staff time card sign in kiosk? All great uses of thin clients.
Developers, sysadmin, dbas? Thin clients quickly run out of gas.
Phew, I thought I was the only one thinking that. I looked at that little ammo box and thought, that'll maybe stop the first or second human wave? My robot sentries will have ammo drum(s) attached!
Well the good news that the memresister brain will be part of the dash of my flying car, it'll run on some synthetic fuel created from clean coal and blue green algae. All of this will be available in 5 years!
Yeah, okay so this guy worked for Ford... Okay it stole some secrets... Okay he delivered them to some Chinese company... these are the accusations made.
Let's broadly assume he did it for this thought exercise. Let's keep this in mind... Now let's put ourselves in this guys shoes... Even if you thought
Why would you come back into this country with that material on a competitors laptop? Seriously WTF?
Realize who this service is aimed at... When these people joined facebook they gladly handed over passwords for all their email accounts and instant messaging services. Now all this stuff is going to be done in house.
At this point, if you've used facebook and you haven't been completely neurotic about what you're exposing, they've got a very good handle on who you are, who your friends are, what's in your inbox and what's in your friends inbox.
Those of us, who want to keep our privacy won't use this service. That other group of people have already lost their privacy, they just haven't realized it yet.
If that was the case, you'd go out in the middle of the Pacific far away from any prying eyes and test it at a place like area 51. Launching off the coast of the California is rather public. Looking at the video it *looks* like a SLBM from my untrained eyes, but who knows.
The problem we had was the show just sucked. My sci-fi tank only holds so much and there so much stuff out there that people now are bit harsher. It's gotta be really good or it's gone.
I took the dive and bought a Kinesis keyboard and I've never looked back. http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/ Yes... it's a 300 dollar keyboard... Don't cheap out on your health!
I can't read a lick of German, but I work with people who can... So I got a rather quick verbal translation of the article...
These guys basically steamrolled the users onto Linux without doing an adequate evaluation of their environment and without following through with a solid beta program. I'm sensing this *could* have been successful if they'd been more organized about it.
I speak from experience as a guy whose been responsible for a somewhat medium sized (several departments in a large corporation) migration from windows to Linux.
The first thing you do is you go talk to your users and figure out what they're doing for a job and see if Linux actually will work in their environment! If they spend all day writing VB applications that interact with a SQLserver database... Linux probably won't be a good fit.
The next thing you do is go and recruit some beta users who are willing to be guinea pigs. Then setup a system that'll work for them. Be prepared to sit in plenty of offices and debug issues. After the kinks have been worked out and they've been happily working for a week or two... convert a few more users... rinse, latter, repeat. It might be that you'll get all the kinks worked out and you can do 20 people at a time.
A few things you need to consider even before doing this... * Authentication... is each machine going to be an island? Most corporations really frown on this... are you going to tie them into Active Directory? Setup a NIS bridge? Things to think about.. * Home Directories... Where's their home dir going to reside? In my case, peoples home directories hang off a unix machine running NIS / Samba, so that wasn't such an issue... * Printers, etc.
Also remember that your users will never give you the full truth... invariably you'll get a call because [insert obscure scan/printer/web cam] doesn't work.
Another thing you need to be able to do is concede defeat in some cases. In each department I've got probably ~20 people who didn't want to switch. Either they didn't want to switch or there was some compelling reason that they couldn't switch, be okay with it and move on.
So this migration had nothing do with Linux not being suitable for the desktop, this was a IT failure.
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I have to say... I started playing with linux ~15 years ago... those were dark days... I remember working install fests where we struggled to get linux to install and drivers for video cards and sound cards were spotty at best.
Now? I PXE boot to the installer of my choice, press a couple of buttons or have the installer pointed at some automated install file, close my eyes and ~10 minutes later I can be reasonably assured that I'll have a fully functional linux machine.
I've got a number of linux and window desktop machines. Based on the number of tickets submitted to RT for issues, in terms of ROI, right now linux is totally winning.
Apparently these hacks missed the whole DVR revolution? They never ever heard of slingbox?
As far as I can recognize TV viewers fall into the following categories.
* Traditional TV watchers who structure their lives around watching specific shows at a specific time.
* DVR TV watchers who sit down and watch a previously recorded show. Maybe at some specific time (such as after the kids are in bed, etc) maybe not.
* Content consumers who watch their show of choice on their device of choice, may it be a tablet, laptop, smartphone, etc.
It's quite possible there's a Venn diagram of the latter two.
The executives want the first kind, stubbornly tolerate the second kind and absolutely hate the third kind (it would appear). What it comes down to is that their revenue model is breaking and they can't adapt fast enough.
I'm of the opinion that we need to move to an ala-carte system where you'd pay for the channels you want.
I've long argued that Itanium was Intel's vehicle to kill PA-RISC and get HP out of the high performance computing market and it worked. Intel let that CPU die a death of a thousand committee compromises while simultaneously plundering all of the technology they could out of Alpha and rolling out their Xeon cpus out at much higher clock speeds and with features that weren't in Itanium.
I worked at a computer company and we built servers that used PA-RISC cpus at the time and we got our hands on some Itanium samples and needless to say, we decided to migrate the platform to Xeon instead.
Here's what I want to know... Were these satellites built with provisions (such as connectors/etc) to allow for in orbit refueling? If so, it seems perfectly reasonable to have a small spacecraft mosey up to the satellite and give it a top off. However, once you start cutting into the thermal blankets to expose the fuel lines, I have to wonder what their success rate is going to be. I have to imagine if they're embarking on this adventure they've figured out how to do this with some reasonable rate of success. Also I have to imagine this option would only really be entertained for a spacecraft that's near it's end of useful life due to fuel shortage.
As someone who spends a lot of time up in the White Mountains, practically every group of hikers carries a FRS radio. Practically every channel and subchannel is busy with chatter. You hear lots of conversations that go something like:
"Hey, everybody in hiking group X, switch to channel 4, subchannel 5" and then you'll hear "Nope, we're on 4.5, try 10.2"
I've come to the conclusion this guy's a nitwit. Though considering the lobby that the defence contractors have in Washington, this proposal will get no where.
Sounds more like an unauthorized code injection...
Am I the only one who read that comment and the voice in my head sounded like Prof. Farnsworth?
Firstly, I'm a fan of playing rather out of date games. It'll really suck when I go to save my game and in fact I can't because that cloud resource is long gone. This sounds like yet another way Sony can obsolete games out of their catalogue to keep them off the resale market.
/dev/null..."</mobster voice> There's been some talk about keying video games because DRM schemes on consoles have proven vulnerable. I can only imagine a situation where Sony just makes every game with an embedded serial number. Your cloud account would have both the serial numbers of your consoles and the games you own. Give your game to your buddy to play? Nope... the games keyed to your account. Or possibly it could come up in the game and say "This game is owned by X, you can play but you can't save"
Secondly, I'm leary of Sony eventually turning this into a for pay service and then holding a virtual gun to my game saves. <mobster voice> "Pay up or your Rachet and Clank save is gonna have an accident with
Honestly, I expect this behaviour from downloaded games. I understand I can't copy it 1000 times. However, for physical media, there shouldn't be such limitations. (Yes, I know people copy physical games).
My wife also got droid envy and ended up with a HTC Eris and she loves it.
Here's my take on this argument. It's really all about choice. Even though we've got two Android phones in the house, I've never upgraded either. What bothers me is a company purposely engineering my personal choice out of the equation. If I'm spending ~$300 on a phone, I better have the ability to modify/upgrade it at my leisure.
I can slightly understand my cell provider being twitchy about zillions of users suddenly running possibly sketchy versions of software on their network.
However, when a company takes choice out of my hands, they've lost my business.
They said these house robots were all 3 laws compliment, yet it seems every time a law firm tries to sue one of these robot companies most of the staff dies from "accidents".
Take Mr. Jenkins. Not one day after he filed suit against "US Robotics" wouldn't you know they found him in bed with his skull caved in by a frying pan. Apparently in what the technicians are calling a "glitch" the robot confused his head for the dishwasher.
Capcom is just saddened they got caught... No worries if it sells enough copies, Apple will in turn copy it and then ban the original from their application store!
What he meant was this:
"Listen up... we've been live for about a year and this shit it getting old. I was really hoping to sell this whole adventure for a tidy profit and get the fuck out of dodge... So... I'm gonna need ya to come in on Saturdays... In fact come in on Sundays as well... Since you have no stake in the company you are expendable and the moment the ink is dry on the purchase and sale expect to be shown the door with zero fan fair. Now get your asses to work and make me a {million,billion}aire!"
I find it rather scary that your boss is so clueless on how to grow the business that he's grasping at straws. I guess the whole concept of actually talking to your customers and perspective customers on what improvements they'd like in the product must seem crazy.
Well the deal would be like this. I'd be a holder of the data, but I wouldn't hold any of the keys. Sure, try and come to steal the data, it won't do you any good.
As for being well armed, that's a given. Anything that even looks hostile would be riddled with bullets at 5 miles from a mark 45.
Expect the decks to be clear of anything that provides cover and swept frequently with remotely controlled automatic gun fire.
My optimum boat for this would be a medium size cargo ship capable of running on diesel.
One hold would be converted to a state of the art computer room.
Another hold would contain all the machinery of a thermal depolymerization plant. I'd also rig the boat with outboard skimmers so I could skirt the edges of the giant plastic patch in the Pacific and convert the plastic into oil to fire the engines and run the generators.
A third hold would be converted into a tanker space to hold spare oil. I could then sell excess as profit.
I figure this way I can keep the worlds data safe and do it in an semi-ecological manner.
Firstly, law enforcement isn't stupid. They know that your first phone call will be to someone who can remote wipe the device. Hence the first thing they'll do is slip your phone into a Faraday box.
Secondly, what data do you have on your phone that you don't have backup up somewhere else? Your contacts? Your email? If you think in a second that Apple or Google won't just hand over your data without blinking, you're mad. Even if it's encrypted on the device, it'll be somewhere else possibly in plain text.
You need a secure device that has everything encrypted. You need a duress password that will destroy the device upon entering.
You need to have your data stored in a location and place where it's both encrypted and also out of the jurisdiction of [insert federal law enforcement agency of your choice]
I know it sounds a bit crazy, but I think you could make a business case for a data haven that was ship based that would sit in international waters out of the reach of the FBI/CIA/NSA/* would be unable to get to it.
We have both where I work and it breaks down into what they're going to be using it for.
If you're setting up a training center and you want an utterly locked down environment, thin clients make tons of sense. Reception desk, security desk, cleaning staff time card sign in kiosk? All great uses of thin clients.
Developers, sysadmin, dbas? Thin clients quickly run out of gas.
Phew, I thought I was the only one thinking that. I looked at that little ammo box and thought, that'll maybe stop the first or second human wave? My robot sentries will have ammo drum(s) attached!
Well the good news that the memresister brain will be part of the dash of my flying car, it'll run on some synthetic fuel created from clean coal and blue green algae. All of this will be available in 5 years!
Yeah, okay so this guy worked for Ford... Okay it stole some secrets... Okay he delivered them to some Chinese company... these are the accusations made.
Let's broadly assume he did it for this thought exercise. Let's keep this in mind... Now let's put ourselves in this guys shoes... Even if you thought
Why would you come back into this country with that material on a competitors laptop? Seriously WTF?
Realize who this service is aimed at... When these people joined facebook they gladly handed over passwords for all their email accounts and instant messaging services. Now all this stuff is going to be done in house.
At this point, if you've used facebook and you haven't been completely neurotic about what you're exposing, they've got a very good handle on who you are, who your friends are, what's in your inbox and what's in your friends inbox.
Those of us, who want to keep our privacy won't use this service. That other group of people have already lost their privacy, they just haven't realized it yet.
If that was the case, you'd go out in the middle of the Pacific far away from any prying eyes and test it at a place like area 51. Launching off the coast of the California is rather public. Looking at the video it *looks* like a SLBM from my untrained eyes, but who knows.
The problem we had was the show just sucked. My sci-fi tank only holds so much and there so much stuff out there that people now are bit harsher. It's gotta be really good or it's gone.
I took the dive and bought a Kinesis keyboard and I've never looked back. http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/
Yes... it's a 300 dollar keyboard... Don't cheap out on your health!
The good news is that the couch would only cost you ~$50, however the ink would easily cost more than your entire house...
It's called Fedora
I can't read a lick of German, but I work with people who can... So I got a rather quick verbal translation of the article...
These guys basically steamrolled the users onto Linux without doing an adequate evaluation of their environment and without following through with a solid beta program. I'm sensing this *could* have been successful if they'd been more organized about it.
I speak from experience as a guy whose been responsible for a somewhat medium sized (several departments in a large corporation) migration from windows to Linux.
The first thing you do is you go talk to your users and figure out what they're doing for a job and see if Linux actually will work in their environment! If they spend all day writing VB applications that interact with a SQLserver database... Linux probably won't be a good fit.
The next thing you do is go and recruit some beta users who are willing to be guinea pigs. Then setup a system that'll work for them. Be prepared to sit in plenty of offices and debug issues. After the kinks have been worked out and they've been happily working for a week or two... convert a few more users... rinse, latter, repeat. It might be that you'll get all the kinks worked out and you can do 20 people at a time.
A few things you need to consider even before doing this...
* Authentication... is each machine going to be an island? Most corporations really frown on this... are you going to tie them into Active Directory? Setup a NIS bridge? Things to think about..
* Home Directories... Where's their home dir going to reside? In my case, peoples home directories hang off a unix machine running NIS / Samba, so that wasn't such an issue...
* Printers, etc.
Also remember that your users will never give you the full truth... invariably you'll get a call because [insert obscure scan/printer/web cam] doesn't work.
Another thing you need to be able to do is concede defeat in some cases. In each department I've got probably ~20 people who didn't want to switch. Either they didn't want to switch or there was some compelling reason that they couldn't switch, be okay with it and move on.
So this migration had nothing do with Linux not being suitable for the desktop, this was a IT failure.