Yeah, something like 3 million profit.
Offset against their net losses (IIRC that was in the billions).... well the weather report doesn't show snow _just_ yet.
The future truly is bright if we can point to that, and say they're a success. The dotcom boom all over again!
Hot swapping is done already, not just on mainframes. After all, database servers/web servers often need 'high' reliablility.
The newer sun kit (I'm thinking their V880) will support hot plug pci power and disks, the E10k will handle hot swap processors and mainboards.(which is why it costs a bit, and sun are willing to _guarantee_ a high availability - about 99.999% I believe)
I believe an RS6000 will cope with this too.
(The Starfire - getting close to a mainframe admittedly:))
Re:An invention clearly ahead of its time
on
Time for a Beer?
·
· Score: 1
Why would you want a bath in a pub?
Some sort of weird fetish?
Hmm computers as artistry. I like that concept.
Maybe I try convincing my boss that I'm _actually_ an artist and thus need lots of 'creative' time (playing quake).
Problem is, legal or not, electronic crime is _so_ hard to gather evidence and prosecute.
A skript kiddy is pretty safe, as are spammers. It's hard to prosecute, difficult to gather evidence (a compromised machine is fundamentally 'contamintated' evidence, an uncompromised machine hasn't been hacked and therefore is rarely worth prosecuting). Computer forensics have been around for a while, but the kiddiez are protected by 2 things.
Corporate inertia - the cost of admitting a break in and the damage it does to the share price is often more than any damage an intruder can do.
Sheer numbers. There's an awful lot of idiots with net connections, who think its l33t to DoS, skript etc. Computer literacy isn't always a good thing:)
BTW, I'm *not* trying to flame or be prejudiced here, I'm simply trying to state facts. Please read and judge accordingly.
Unfortunately this is the case. An ideal world is one where everyone is equal. It remains the case that in many parts of the world, this is blatantly not so. The average salary for a woman is overall lower.
If your english is not so good, then someone 'fluent' in it is going to assume you are not as clever. (This is leaving aside the _possibly_ valid point that if you cannot communicate well with your employer, then you are also unlikely to do so with you collegues).
Unfortunately discrimination is a fact. It's built from prejudices about what your idea candidate will be. So often getting a job is about presenting yourself to your employer in a favourable manner.
You'll often find that a manager's impression of an ideal employee is sort of like themselves but younger - same skin color, similar accent, quite close in age. This is simply because of something which is fundamentally ingrained in an awful lot of people. You grow up surrounded by a particular set of people. Differences are instinctively percieved to be 'not right'.
Sad, maybe, but true enough. Eventually the world will realise that there isn't really any difference (most do now at an intellectual level, but until as kids, it becomes a commonplace thing, then it's not going to change at an instinctive level), but the process is saddeningly slow.
But maybe I am a misplaced human on a capitalist society;-)
Please report yourself to the thought police forthwith. Such displays of humanity are incorrect and you must therefore be lobotomised.
Ummm. No, that's not what it says:
Amazon's warehouses employed only 4,000 temps and 3,700 full-time employees
So by my book that's 52%
In 2000 that number looks more like 62%...
The world economy has always been built upon the backs of a 'disposable' workforce.
Let's face it, paying minimum wage to people is cheaper than automating a production line (and of course, they can argue that they are providing valuable jobs).
It's heavy handed and unethical (IHMO) but companies (with a _few_ limited exceptions) are only interested in the bottom line.
I've done the temping thing for a while, and there was certainly variety (like I'd be in a different job every week), but you are also treated as little more than 'an extra body'. They can get another one easily enough, so they can get you to work, trample on you, and if you go replace you in a day.
(Much happier now I'm working full time doing 'skilled' rather than manual labour. Least this way I get a month's notice before being told to walk)
And whilst we're at it, we can ban fertilizer, bleach, washing powder, flour, all petrol byproducts, potassium salt, water (electricity = fun oxygen/hydrogen mix) since all of these can be turned into explosives.
Whilst we're at it, paracetamol is dangerous, so is... errm well virtually everything if abused.
Slippery slope, banning things 'because they might be dangerous' is a dangerously daft political attitude.
OK, so can I use the 1.2Kw it generates to electrolyticly make some hydrogen to power it? WOo infinite energy!
Or maybe I can use a giant orbital laser aimed at my swimming pool.
Even better, I could just aim the laser at a spot in my kitchen, and use it to cook stuff.
Truly stuff of the future (but $100 for 10*1.2KW/hr seems a little evil, not to mention the generator cost.)
A subscription model won't let you do this (without a heavily software modification by crackers).
My money is on the crackers winning. To my knowledge, very few games have _not_ been cracked in some measure. Those which are most resilient are those which require a login to a 'game server' (Diablo II battle net or Half life online). Even then, unless you want to play online, it's quite possible to get them going.
Which looks to be the way things are going I suppose, but it'll really suck to have to run a net connection _just_ to be able to use their application.
Now there's a thought. 'fake' authentication servers? Is that even possible?
Time will tell at a guess. My money though, is on people just sticking with the 'best' version of a product which doesn't require the upgrade.
Of course, the other problem with such an approach is that you are 'locked in' to the service contract your supplier provides. If you buy a product, then you have a right to use, and no further tie to the supplier (except for patches etc). But with a.NET what's to stop Microsoft from getting the world from using (for example).NET Word, gradually mangling all their document formats to something encrypted and compressed with some cheesy proprietary format, and then hiking the 'rental' fee.
You've basically 'given' all your stuff to MS and they can rob you because of it. Not a pleasant thought. (OK, so to a certain extent this is the case now, but if I buy a copy of Word, I can remain sure that it'll remain the same, and continue to let me read my documents for the next few hundred years. Well, maybe.)
My company is in no rush to adopt XP. At the current time we're sticking with NT4 (some 2000). The reason is quite simple (and two fold) - the overall cost over the 'product lifespan' is significantly more. If you buy a copy of NT, then you own a copy of NT (or site license). It will remain 'valid' for several years (5 or so) and is a one off cost. Even better is the fact that when we buy a new PC this is included as the Redmond tax and thus is an 'invisible' cost to the business.
(No I don't like this practice, but the company as a whole does)
The other reason is the difference between capital and ongoing running costs. If you are renewing an XP license each year, your _service_ cost increases per desktop. As an IT department, we don't care, but our users definitely do.
The 'capital expenditure' of buying a new workstation and a copy of an OS goes into a different 'budget bucket'. It makes it easier to explain as 'we need to buy a PC and a copy of windows' rather than 'We need to buy a PC, and then we need to pay for a license for it each year'.
I'm really hoping this master plan of microsoft is going to fail. IT is the same situation as ASP - software developers want to have a steady income, but end users and companies see it as a 'I pay x bucks for your product'.
As long as any software distributer is selling 'forever' licenses, few are going to opt in to an ongoing fee service (IMHO).
The real problem is going to be pissed people on the way back from the pub throwing up in it.
If yer in a taxi they can hit you lots until you clear it up any pay for cleaning.
On a bus, well sort of the same.
Can you imagine getting aboard one of this and smelling a 2 hour old pool of vomit?
As long as I can fit my exoskeleton in, that's fine.
Just got to wonder though, we already have this neat invention which you can use to take you places (supermarket, home etc.) It's more commonly called a taxi.
I suppose a combo taxi/hire car might work... It's got to catch on first (and recoup that 45 million they're investing).
Got 'em.
It's those little rectangular CD things that they can hand around.
They make a gawd awful noise, and it's always struck me as a _really_ neat way to propagate malware to clueless drones.
Here, insert this CD into your drive. No I promise that when it autoruns all you'll get is a nice web page. Honest.
Legally? Yes.
If you have _anything_ which is capable of being tuned to a TV channel, (BBC) then technically you have to buy a license.
Actually, I think they make an exception for a) a portable, or b) if you can demonstrate that it cannot receive BBC TV. And they seem to ignore TV cards cos it just isn't worth the effort (IIRC their detectors cannot 'find' a PC monitor since it works in a different way to a TV)
So in theory, if you had one of those funky radio scanner base stations, you have to get a TV license...:)
Watch, as I wear a circuit board.
And verily, those little LED's that are flashing are part of a binary adder.
It's one up on a T-Shirt with perl code or Pi on it:)
TV licenseing authority in.uk do the same (yes, I know you don't have that in many other places, but we get no adverts).
They send nasty letters saying 'We know you don't have a TV license, and you're breaking the law' even when you don't actually have a TV.
That said, if I got a letter like that from the BSA I'd probably go round a few machines to check. With the best will in the world wrt to legit software, your biggest problem is still going to be your users installing 'this copy of $PRODUCT that I borrowed off my mate'
BSA might be facists, but I suppose that software development houses do have a right to protect their interests.
Long live open source!
(Of course, if you were running a linux shop, an officious thug might get really confused when you point out that no, actually you hadn't paid for a license for... well almost anything actually. And then you'd have the headache of fishing out all those GPL license agreements which of course, everyone keeps a hard copy of, to get them to go away:))
Slashdot Mirror
'least then you can DoS their servers :)
;p
TV ads are much harder to deal with
OK, so how much will ya offer me for a 50 Karma account? ;) :)
Well, probably a few less than that when I get modded down for this
Yeah, something like 3 million profit.
Offset against their net losses (IIRC that was in the billions).... well the weather report doesn't show snow _just_ yet.
The future truly is bright if we can point to that, and say they're a success. The dotcom boom all over again!
Because they're either muppets, trolls or both.
Hot swapping is done already, not just on mainframes. After all, database servers/web servers often need 'high' reliablility. :))
The newer sun kit (I'm thinking their V880) will support hot plug pci power and disks, the E10k will handle hot swap processors and mainboards.(which is why it costs a bit, and sun are willing to _guarantee_ a high availability - about 99.999% I believe)
I believe an RS6000 will cope with this too.
(The Starfire - getting close to a mainframe admittedly
Why would you want a bath in a pub?
Some sort of weird fetish?
Hmm computers as artistry. I like that concept.
Maybe I try convincing my boss that I'm _actually_ an artist and thus need lots of 'creative' time (playing quake).
Problem is, legal or not, electronic crime is _so_ hard to gather evidence and prosecute. :)
A skript kiddy is pretty safe, as are spammers. It's hard to prosecute, difficult to gather evidence (a compromised machine is fundamentally 'contamintated' evidence, an uncompromised machine hasn't been hacked and therefore is rarely worth prosecuting). Computer forensics have been around for a while, but the kiddiez are protected by 2 things.
Corporate inertia - the cost of admitting a break in and the damage it does to the share price is often more than any damage an intruder can do.
Sheer numbers. There's an awful lot of idiots with net connections, who think its l33t to DoS, skript etc. Computer literacy isn't always a good thing
BTW, I'm *not* trying to flame or be prejudiced here, I'm simply trying to state facts. Please read and judge accordingly.
Unfortunately this is the case. An ideal world is one where everyone is equal. It remains the case that in many parts of the world, this is blatantly not so. The average salary for a woman is overall lower.
If your english is not so good, then someone 'fluent' in it is going to assume you are not as clever. (This is leaving aside the _possibly_ valid point that if you cannot communicate well with your employer, then you are also unlikely to do so with you collegues).
Unfortunately discrimination is a fact. It's built from prejudices about what your idea candidate will be. So often getting a job is about presenting yourself to your employer in a favourable manner.
You'll often find that a manager's impression of an ideal employee is sort of like themselves but younger - same skin color, similar accent, quite close in age. This is simply because of something which is fundamentally ingrained in an awful lot of people. You grow up surrounded by a particular set of people. Differences are instinctively percieved to be 'not right'.
Sad, maybe, but true enough. Eventually the world will realise that there isn't really any difference (most do now at an intellectual level, but until as kids, it becomes a commonplace thing, then it's not going to change at an instinctive level), but the process is saddeningly slow.
But maybe I am a misplaced human on a capitalist society ;-)
Please report yourself to the thought police forthwith. Such displays of humanity are incorrect and you must therefore be lobotomised.
Ummm. No, that's not what it says:
Amazon's warehouses employed only 4,000 temps and 3,700 full-time employees
So by my book that's 52%
In 2000 that number looks more like 62%...
The world economy has always been built upon the backs of a 'disposable' workforce.
Let's face it, paying minimum wage to people is cheaper than automating a production line (and of course, they can argue that they are providing valuable jobs).
It's heavy handed and unethical (IHMO) but companies (with a _few_ limited exceptions) are only interested in the bottom line.
I've done the temping thing for a while, and there was certainly variety (like I'd be in a different job every week), but you are also treated as little more than 'an extra body'. They can get another one easily enough, so they can get you to work, trample on you, and if you go replace you in a day.
(Much happier now I'm working full time doing 'skilled' rather than manual labour. Least this way I get a month's notice before being told to walk)
Ok, so what's the betting that these 'chip card signers' get used as coffee mats by 95% of of the people who they've been given to? :)
Repartition or reformat?
Have a look at Testdisk if you've reformatted, then it's too late, but this may save your prodigous MP3 collection.
And whilst we're at it, we can ban fertilizer, bleach, washing powder, flour, all petrol byproducts, potassium salt, water (electricity = fun oxygen/hydrogen mix) since all of these can be turned into explosives. ... errm well virtually everything if abused.
Whilst we're at it, paracetamol is dangerous, so is
Slippery slope, banning things 'because they might be dangerous' is a dangerously daft political attitude.
OK, so can I use the 1.2Kw it generates to electrolyticly make some hydrogen to power it? WOo infinite energy!
Or maybe I can use a giant orbital laser aimed at my swimming pool.
Even better, I could just aim the laser at a spot in my kitchen, and use it to cook stuff.
Truly stuff of the future (but $100 for 10*1.2KW/hr seems a little evil, not to mention the generator cost.)
A subscription model won't let you do this (without a heavily software modification by crackers).
My money is on the crackers winning. To my knowledge, very few games have _not_ been cracked in some measure. Those which are most resilient are those which require a login to a 'game server' (Diablo II battle net or Half life online). Even then, unless you want to play online, it's quite possible to get them going.
Which looks to be the way things are going I suppose, but it'll really suck to have to run a net connection _just_ to be able to use their application.
Now there's a thought. 'fake' authentication servers? Is that even possible?
Time will tell at a guess. My money though, is on people just sticking with the 'best' version of a product which doesn't require the upgrade.
Of course, the other problem with such an approach is that you are 'locked in' to the service contract your supplier provides. If you buy a product, then you have a right to use, and no further tie to the supplier (except for patches etc). But with a .NET what's to stop Microsoft from getting the world from using (for example) .NET Word, gradually mangling all their document formats to something encrypted and compressed with some cheesy proprietary format, and then hiking the 'rental' fee.
You've basically 'given' all your stuff to MS and they can rob you because of it. Not a pleasant thought. (OK, so to a certain extent this is the case now, but if I buy a copy of Word, I can remain sure that it'll remain the same, and continue to let me read my documents for the next few hundred years. Well, maybe.)
My company is in no rush to adopt XP. At the current time we're sticking with NT4 (some 2000). The reason is quite simple (and two fold) - the overall cost over the 'product lifespan' is significantly more. If you buy a copy of NT, then you own a copy of NT (or site license). It will remain 'valid' for several years (5 or so) and is a one off cost. Even better is the fact that when we buy a new PC this is included as the Redmond tax and thus is an 'invisible' cost to the business.
(No I don't like this practice, but the company as a whole does)
The other reason is the difference between capital and ongoing running costs. If you are renewing an XP license each year, your _service_ cost increases per desktop. As an IT department, we don't care, but our users definitely do.
The 'capital expenditure' of buying a new workstation and a copy of an OS goes into a different 'budget bucket'. It makes it easier to explain as 'we need to buy a PC and a copy of windows' rather than 'We need to buy a PC, and then we need to pay for a license for it each year'.
I'm really hoping this master plan of microsoft is going to fail. IT is the same situation as ASP - software developers want to have a steady income, but end users and companies see it as a 'I pay x bucks for your product'.
As long as any software distributer is selling 'forever' licenses, few are going to opt in to an ongoing fee service (IMHO).
The real problem is going to be pissed people on the way back from the pub throwing up in it.
If yer in a taxi they can hit you lots until you clear it up any pay for cleaning.
On a bus, well sort of the same.
Can you imagine getting aboard one of this and smelling a 2 hour old pool of vomit?
As long as I can fit my exoskeleton in, that's fine.
Just got to wonder though, we already have this neat invention which you can use to take you places (supermarket, home etc.) It's more commonly called a taxi.
I suppose a combo taxi/hire car might work... It's got to catch on first (and recoup that 45 million they're investing).
Got 'em.
It's those little rectangular CD things that they can hand around.
They make a gawd awful noise, and it's always struck me as a _really_ neat way to propagate malware to clueless drones.
Here, insert this CD into your drive. No I promise that when it autoruns all you'll get is a nice web page. Honest.
Legally? Yes. :)
If you have _anything_ which is capable of being tuned to a TV channel, (BBC) then technically you have to buy a license.
Actually, I think they make an exception for a) a portable, or b) if you can demonstrate that it cannot receive BBC TV. And they seem to ignore TV cards cos it just isn't worth the effort (IIRC their detectors cannot 'find' a PC monitor since it works in a different way to a TV)
So in theory, if you had one of those funky radio scanner base stations, you have to get a TV license...
Watch, as I wear a circuit board. :)
And verily, those little LED's that are flashing are part of a binary adder.
It's one up on a T-Shirt with perl code or Pi on it
TV licenseing authority in .uk do the same (yes, I know you don't have that in many other places, but we get no adverts). :))
They send nasty letters saying 'We know you don't have a TV license, and you're breaking the law' even when you don't actually have a TV.
That said, if I got a letter like that from the BSA I'd probably go round a few machines to check. With the best will in the world wrt to legit software, your biggest problem is still going to be your users installing 'this copy of $PRODUCT that I borrowed off my mate'
BSA might be facists, but I suppose that software development houses do have a right to protect their interests.
Long live open source!
(Of course, if you were running a linux shop, an officious thug might get really confused when you point out that no, actually you hadn't paid for a license for... well almost anything actually. And then you'd have the headache of fishing out all those GPL license agreements which of course, everyone keeps a hard copy of, to get them to go away