It's strangely enough not the first time America was under corporate rules, The original Boston tea party did not actually target the British government but "The Company" an organization that looks a lot like the modern multinationals with the exception that it actually employed mercenary armies and ran most of the British Colonies. But then again modern megacorps are getting closer to the same power and structure as the East India Companies" as time progresses and will be even more powerful and even more entangled with the government then the old East India Companies if the trend continues.
Another strange detail of history is that Adam Smith's "Wealth Of Nations" were written to explain exactly how dangerous those kind of organizations were. And yet those now advocating a return to Mercantilism claims to be followers of Adam Smith ideals.
The problem here is the primary education system, if you defend primary education(or let the anti-science crowd run the show) your not able to run a sensible university system for the general masses to the point where you need to be able to import skilled workers while the unemployment lines grow,
With a effective primary and secondary education system pretty much everyone who apply will be ready for university levels, and you can generally depend on primary and secondary grades to Scandinavia works this way for instance, and most of Europe tries to adopt to that model. And were talking about countries where universities are far more subsidized then the US here.
The problem here is either that the primary education system was teaching different facts then the university exams expected, or that someone screwed up on the auto-grading multiple choice system(multiple choice exams are notorious for being either easy to game or rigged toward memorization of very specific phases).
The problem with the TPM is not the TPM it's that win8 equipment is using something that should really be called UEFI lite ie a TPM with a reduced set of key management features mostly binding the end user to always trust what was shipped with the chip and everything trusted by those, ie should Microsoft loose control over one of their keys you as a user have a system that will run viruses and spyware as trusted OS component and there's nothing short of removing the TPM chip, you can do to fix it as antivirus is not allowed to mess with trusted code(ie antivirus would only be effective against signed malware in unsecure mode). Ohh and the NSA have full access to MS's signing keys. With the non TPM systems antivirus can prevent any binary library/driver it identifies from running(it's the identifying that the hard part.)
Had UEFI/TPM been implemented as Intel/IBM intended it the system owner would have full edit access to the keystore using hw overide, Ie the system owner would have full control over what software that gets trusted, and the user can even add their own keys, this is not how secure mode on win8 systems work.
The real reason why LaTeX is now hopelessly outdated is that it's even more of a paper simulator then the "WordPerfect" clones ie it's centered around creating a beautiful readable output nobody will ever see in a modern document workflow, where things never really gets printed or published to readers but circulated in it's "write enabled form". LaTeX is based around a dying way of thinking about document.
With LyX you get a system that solves a problem that only existed with an now obsolete way of using computers to create documents.
What is flexisheet and are you even able to solve the problems with it people solve with excel/calc remember again that the way people use spreadsheets today might have very little to do with how academia thought spreadsheets were supposed to be used back in the early days of pc usage.
And yet we have indies being forced to get publishers on the XBox platform, something dont add up.
This is basically the walled garden problem, in order for the walled garden to give the security benefits the curator promises the walled garden need gatekeepers, as MS cant afford to actually vet everything they need to limit the amount of companies/people who can publish content into the walled garden, hence cutting out small scale independent who don't want to give some established insider what is basically an bribe for entry into the walled garden.
MS probably want the indie's and do probably do have some measures to help indies get past the bribe seeking gatekeepers but unlike their competitors MS have a system that is dependent on a small number of gatekeepers in order for it to be viable.
The BSA will have a field day slamming companies that migrate off site licensing windows and MS Office for using limited licenses or even worse pirated software on the BYOD equipment used to conduct the company's business. if you don't actually provide employee's with a licensing budget or depend s
To get around it means getting in t equally big trouble with labor laws banning the nonfree-freelancer loophole some companies have used to pretend they to not have obligations as an employer in the past.
The main problem with BYOD is the fact that you cant legally demand that your employee's bring the device you want them to without compensation, at least not in the civilized part of the wold. ie no matter what the company is going to wind up paying most of the HW bill, and all of the licensing bills. And you still need to support the equipment.
The problem here is not as much that you cant manage the security aspects but that you cant just slash your IT budget without breaking contract and employment law. And without the option of cutting IT budgets most BYOD business cases just fall a part.
202 comments on VOIP and nobody mentioning teamspeak, mumble or Ventrillo?
If your looking for something that's going to set your apart from your lynq/exhange/avaya using competitors that a direction you might want to look at.
The whole groupware thing is in a lot of way corporations trying to achieve what the various geek subcultures have done for decades and allow teams to function independently of geography, without loosing the mid 90ies serious business office vibe.
Poking further outside of the "made exclusively for business" box you find IRC servers, conventional web forums etc,
I know this is not what the OP mentions but it's worth noting that there is different approaches to doing in team communication then the tools that is directly derived from the stuff that got adopted by the old school office in the mid 90ies.
No probably the http://europa.eu/about-eu/institutions-bodies/court-justice/index_en.htm which is supposed to upheld the "federal EU legislation" against the local governments and in generally gets involved in almost every principal case as a standard practice by the local supreme courts, the fact that few cases actually make it all the way is due to a process of advisory where the national court ask the EU court for advice, on cases where EU law may be relevant.
The interesting thing is that the main tactics in the war on "fair use" seams to be outsourcing the regulation to private parties who does not get a realistic choice to refuse a takedown request as it will always be both more expansive and more risky to defend their customers rights then not.
This allow some interesting legal doublethink in the context of the US supreme court where you can protect the "freedom" of the "oppressor"(telco) instead of the "oppressed"("uploader"), by granting corporation a privileged personhood status,something that is a bit harder with the general EU legislation because corporation and consumer tend to be more clearly defined.
The basic tactic is to avoid involving the courts, as it spread the risk of financial loss move evenly between the accuser and accused in favor of a "private" pseudo system where it's almost free to accuse and expansive to defend, when things go to court the content industry almost always get's less then they ask for, if anything at all.
At least the high frequency trading mess is leaving some usable wreckage behind that's a lot more then you can say about most of the financial institutions innovations.
Problem is, that windmills are noisy neighbors and cannot cover every square mile, take a place like Denmark with around 20% of energy coming from wind where the eco-activists is now chaining themselves to construction machinery to protest the construction of bigger and hence more noisy windmills in what they consider a Nature reserve.
Above a certain level you simply run out of space, where you can put em without "ruining" someone neighborhood for the windmills and the figures of cost rises significanly when you move the location out into the oceans, hydro reached that point decades ago.
Traditional solar panels are extremely expansive in both energy and material cost to make when you measure pr megawatt, and just not viable on a large scale 10% might be a realistic upper limit. Bio cant provide anything like double digit percentages either, This leaves us with something like 60-70% of our energy need we can only fill with, fosil, nuclear or tech we dont have yet.
If you want to move from gas/diesel cars to hydrogen/battery power you add to this problem by increasing the drain you need to put on the grid by 30-100%.
The problem is that none of the alternative energy forms will generate the same amount of energy we get from fossil without us actually making sacrifices, beyond spending a few billions.
In some parts of Europe we are beginning to see data protection agencies(yes normally an oxymoron) banning the use of clouds, where parts of the infrastructure is outside of their jurisdiction, for anyone licensed to store sensitive information. because they assume that the authorities of that place will always have access to back doors in the platform. Something that have caused the usual cloudvangalists to accuse them of being anti progress and all the lot.
This is causing some ruckus as school districts want to use google docs and hospitals want to move their IT into the cloud where the unicorns roam and IT is free and easy.
One of the biggest issues in the whole nuclear accident meme thing is that well somehow nuclear accidents are only ever compared to other nuclear accidents. But on a wider scale how dangerous is this compared to similar events hitting conventional energy sources? like oil well or refinery fires.
Chrome like safari is based on the rather old khtml engine(of konqueror fame) that always was fast but tended to do pretty bad when rendering non standard html the way the author intended(and nobody especially google writes standard html) that issue slowly got fixed, and when apple got involved(and it got renamed to webkit), it took off for mainstream use.
Chromes javascript performance along with firefox latest 6x improvement is achived by going from parsed code to compile on load or JIT compilation.
Version numbers are often marketing tools firefox is at triple digit version numbers if you convert it to the scheme chrome uses, it makes little sense to use them as indication of progress.
600 SMS'es on the same cell to the same recipient could cause some interesting effects, especially if multiple carriers are involved. You might see random votes get delayed for longish period of time and you might not get the result within seconds. Email is also set up to allow for delays. It might not be a real problem but dont expect a SMS system to be 110% reliable.
Wireless Ethernet fails a lot more transparent i.e. the voters will get a feedback from the system if their transaction fail, SMS/Email will fail silently i.e. it will not be obvius to the voter if transaction went through.
Wasn't this the MS get the fact showcase as to how much better ms.net and sql server were compared to linux? Before the system came crashing down and latency became an issue?
as I understood it, China has control over the vast majority of media- would the population even need a reason more than whatever the govt told them? eg. they are taking our resources... why bother with copyright?
How exactly was it the current batch of chinese plutocrats took power? did they have a full free press back then?
If things gets to obvuis and the "bread and circus" bribes cant be upheld due to a cash shortages populations tend to support revolts. And history is littered with example of those revolts being more the a small anoyance even if they fail. And they dont always fail, often because the army is tied to close to the general public to be of much use in actual popular revolts.
But there might exist an implicit contract between the owners of the park and the caretakers that they retain a usage right to it.
Road usage is the clear cut case, here you will loose in court if you close off a road that have been open to the public. Ownership or not, particularly if you bought the road as a part of a deal after public usage was an established tradition. Implicit contracts does need to be honored.
The stadium issue, have if i remember correctly been taken to court and the card holders got awarded compensation.
Land ownership is not actually always ownership, there countries(UK and Sweden for instance) where you cannot actually own land, but only lease it on permanent contracts.
This varies a lot from country to country some, like my native Denmark does not treat written contracts as superior to oral or implicit contracts, while some common law countries gives formal contracts preferable treatment. But i dont think that there is a western legal system where implicit contracts is not acknowledged by the courts
On the internet you have the big big problem of determining jurisdiction.
Games are just that games they are run for a purpose with a certain agenda, and in most games that agenda involves a kind of fair play doctrine that requires ingame assets to be tied to ingame actions alone and not subject to out of game financial transactions. Here theres no context of a implicit real world ownership, but this might differ Second life for instance might by encouraging real world trading of ingame assets create such a cotexts, The DNS system is an other example here there are an tradition for treating domains as property that can be treated as real asset.
What im trying to say is that the written ToS isnt the entire story of the contract.
IANYAL but im fairly sure this is a fair attempt at describing the actual law.
ohh dont beleave that cloud computing is here to stay at least until someone comes up with a cooler name for the dusty old mainframes still running the world.
The way you do redudancy may have changed but in the end the goal of a cloud computer is the same as the mainframe process every business transaction on the same central system with no downtime as cheaply as posible.
As with mainframes cloud computers have enough up-front cost that timesharing and leasing models becomes interesting.
Virtualisation is another mainframe virtue, seperate the software stack from the hardware stack and run whole OS's as if they were application level services. No real news here.
Will cloud be dominant, maybe, theres enough big iron stil around for it to be a light transition in most businesses, and with game/media consoles gaining traction over PC'es that were never ever used for much besides the internet anyway it might not be as fun selling pc software as it used to be, but mostly things arent changing that much. the nuts and bolt techs and the software maintainance and training people will still be doing mostly the same theyve always done, development jobs wont change much either. The internet have alwauys been about interconnected timeshares/BBS'es anyway, the browser just brought it to the masses.
You can make all sorts of feedback curcuits with a few transistors(act as termostats) some swicthes, a few resitors a few LM324 ot similar amplifies and maybe some more advanced sensors, this kind of stuff is a few doller a set at a bulk retailer, you can make oscilating lights controled by stuff happening in the room with some diodes again dirt cheap and som RC(resistor capacitor) circuits.
"AND" gates are also avaliable cheaply so you could do all sorts of digital fun aswell.
AIX is still somewhat in support, HP-UX the same no OpenSolaris will be around for decades to come we might see Oracle stop pushing it actively for new customers but you dont kill a prodoct like that not with the price some organisation is willing to pay for sevice and support deals for existing systems.
Sometimes it's not about the strategic game of cat and mouse and all about the cash flow.
The problem with google is the terms of service, google does not offer you full ownership of your data, they wont negotiate out out clauses they dont make guranties and whont offer fixed compensation when guranties are breached, it's the same deal with apple and a big reason apple is non existiant in the business to business market.
Take a standard linux netbook use non google webtools and you can get those deals but google acts the same way apple does and ignores the business market, this is wry this debate is pointless google isnt even trying to enter this market, they are plotting to take the low end consumer market not the enterprise market.
The reason this is being debated is that the fortune 5000 companies are trying to ditch their PC's and go back to the mainframes as fast as they can and google is the most visible of the new timeshare systems, because they are consumer oriented and not enterprise oriented.
Theres other players like zimbra, zoho or thinkfree that specificly targets enterprise and some of the old forgotten giants still lingers around in the shadows.
If someone else is making profit your not getting full value for your money, in the teoreticly perfect free market noone makes big profits, big profit's is actually a sign that the market mechanism does not work.
Nobody made more profit then the big party bosses in the polit buro or the arab kings and sheiks.
Yes but mission critical wintel deployment it's probably a lot more expansive in terms of redudancy and support cost then the older mainframes. when they grow to the scale where mainframes used to live.
Windows biggest drawback stability wise was always that it had none and now only week self protection features, a renegade application will take a wintel host down while a mainframe will remain mostly unaffected by bad application code. With properly tested application code you can make a wintel stable, but thats not all that common in the cloud world where almost everything is perpertual beta and to keep that stable you need a underlying platform who can protect itself the way windows can't. especially if your going to rent out the hardware on a timeshare basis, to almost anyone. Unix/Linux remains as always the middle ground it runs on any hardware(now even clasical mainframes) and gets a lot closer to mainframe like behavior then windows.
When microsoft claims that most windows crashes are due to 3rd party code they are actually right, the only problem is that Windows is the making it damn easy for 3rd party code to take the entire system down.
for what i hear AIM is pretty popular in russia of all places while MS mmore or less dominate here in europe, where yahoo is more or less unknown with local startups and broadcasting companies rule the part of the portal word that have not been killed by facebook and google yet.
Slashdot Mirror
It's strangely enough not the first time America was under corporate rules, The original Boston tea party did not actually target the British government but "The Company" an organization that looks a lot like the modern multinationals with the exception that it actually employed mercenary armies and ran most of the British Colonies. But then again modern megacorps are getting closer to the same power and structure as the East India Companies" as time progresses and will be even more powerful and even more entangled with the government then the old East India Companies if the trend continues.
Another strange detail of history is that Adam Smith's "Wealth Of Nations" were written to explain exactly how dangerous those kind of organizations were. And yet those now advocating a return to Mercantilism claims to be followers of Adam Smith ideals.
The problem here is the primary education system, if you defend primary education(or let the anti-science crowd run the show) your not able to run a sensible university system for the general masses to the point where you need to be able to import skilled workers while the unemployment lines grow,
With a effective primary and secondary education system pretty much everyone who apply will be ready for university levels, and you can generally depend on primary and secondary grades to Scandinavia works this way for instance, and most of Europe tries to adopt to that model. And were talking about countries where universities are far more subsidized then the US here.
The problem here is either that the primary education system was teaching different facts then the university exams expected, or that someone screwed up on the auto-grading multiple choice system(multiple choice exams are notorious for being either easy to game or rigged toward memorization of very specific phases).
The problem with the TPM is not the TPM it's that win8 equipment is using something that should really be called UEFI lite ie a TPM with a reduced set of key management features mostly binding the end user to always trust what was shipped with the chip and everything trusted by those, ie should Microsoft loose control over one of their keys you as a user have a system that will run viruses and spyware as trusted OS component and there's nothing short of removing the TPM chip, you can do to fix it as antivirus is not allowed to mess with trusted code(ie antivirus would only be effective against signed malware in unsecure mode). Ohh and the NSA have full access to MS's signing keys. With the non TPM systems antivirus can prevent any binary library/driver it identifies from running(it's the identifying that the hard part.)
Had UEFI/TPM been implemented as Intel/IBM intended it the system owner would have full edit access to the keystore using hw overide, Ie the system owner would have full control over what software that gets trusted, and the user can even add their own keys, this is not how secure mode on win8 systems work.
And LaTeX does online text now.
The real reason why LaTeX is now hopelessly outdated is that it's even more of a paper simulator then the "WordPerfect" clones ie it's centered around creating a beautiful readable output nobody will ever see in a modern document workflow, where things never really gets printed or published to readers but circulated in it's "write enabled form". LaTeX is based around a dying way of thinking about document.
With LyX you get a system that solves a problem that only existed with an now obsolete way of using computers to create documents.
What is flexisheet and are you even able to solve the problems with it people solve with excel/calc remember again that the way people use spreadsheets today might have very little to do with how academia thought spreadsheets were supposed to be used back in the early days of pc usage.
And yet we have indies being forced to get publishers on the XBox platform, something dont add up.
This is basically the walled garden problem, in order for the walled garden to give the security benefits the curator promises the walled garden need gatekeepers, as MS cant afford to actually vet everything they need to limit the amount of companies/people who can publish content into the walled garden, hence cutting out small scale independent who don't want to give some established insider what is basically an bribe for entry into the walled garden.
MS probably want the indie's and do probably do have some measures to help indies get past the bribe seeking gatekeepers but unlike their competitors MS have a system that is dependent on a small number of gatekeepers in order for it to be viable.
The BSA will have a field day slamming companies that migrate off site licensing windows and MS Office for using limited licenses or even worse pirated software on the BYOD equipment used to conduct the company's business. if you don't actually provide employee's with a licensing budget or depend s
To get around it means getting in t equally big trouble with labor laws banning the nonfree-freelancer loophole some companies have used to pretend they to not have obligations as an employer in the past.
The main problem with BYOD is the fact that you cant legally demand that your employee's bring the device you want them to without compensation, at least not in the civilized part of the wold. ie no matter what the company is going to wind up paying most of the HW bill, and all of the licensing bills. And you still need to support the equipment.
The problem here is not as much that you cant manage the security aspects but that you cant just slash your IT budget without breaking contract and employment law. And without the option of cutting IT budgets most BYOD business cases just fall a part.
202 comments on VOIP and nobody mentioning teamspeak, mumble or Ventrillo?
If your looking for something that's going to set your apart from your lynq/exhange/avaya using competitors that a direction you might want to look at.
The whole groupware thing is in a lot of way corporations trying to achieve what the various geek subcultures have done for decades and allow teams to function independently of geography, without loosing the mid 90ies serious business office vibe.
Poking further outside of the "made exclusively for business" box you find IRC servers, conventional web forums etc,
I know this is not what the OP mentions but it's worth noting that there is different approaches to doing in team communication then the tools that is directly derived from the stuff that got adopted by the old school office in the mid 90ies.
No probably the http://europa.eu/about-eu/institutions-bodies/court-justice/index_en.htm which is supposed to upheld the "federal EU legislation" against the local governments and in generally gets involved in almost every principal case as a standard practice by the local supreme courts, the fact that few cases actually make it all the way is due to a process of advisory where the national court ask the EU court for advice, on cases where EU law may be relevant.
The interesting thing is that the main tactics in the war on "fair use" seams to be outsourcing the regulation to private parties who does not get a realistic choice to refuse a takedown request as it will always be both more expansive and more risky to defend their customers rights then not.
This allow some interesting legal doublethink in the context of the US supreme court where you can protect the "freedom" of the "oppressor"(telco) instead of the "oppressed"("uploader"), by granting corporation a privileged personhood status,something that is a bit harder with the general EU legislation because corporation and consumer tend to be more clearly defined.
The basic tactic is to avoid involving the courts, as it spread the risk of financial loss move evenly between the accuser and accused in favor of a "private" pseudo system where it's almost free to accuse and expansive to defend, when things go to court the content industry almost always get's less then they ask for, if anything at all.
At least the high frequency trading mess is leaving some usable wreckage behind that's a lot more then you can say about most of the financial institutions innovations.
Problem is, that windmills are noisy neighbors and cannot cover every square mile, take a place like Denmark with around 20% of energy coming from wind where the eco-activists is now chaining themselves to construction machinery to protest the construction of bigger and hence more noisy windmills in what they consider a Nature reserve.
Above a certain level you simply run out of space, where you can put em without "ruining" someone neighborhood for the windmills and the figures of cost rises significanly when you move the location out into the oceans, hydro reached that point decades ago.
Traditional solar panels are extremely expansive in both energy and material cost to make when you measure pr megawatt, and just not viable on a large scale 10% might be a realistic upper limit. Bio cant provide anything like double digit percentages either, This leaves us with something like 60-70% of our energy need we can only fill with, fosil, nuclear or tech we dont have yet.
If you want to move from gas/diesel cars to hydrogen/battery power you add to this problem by increasing the drain you need to put on the grid by 30-100%.
The problem is that none of the alternative energy forms will generate the same amount of energy we get from fossil without us actually making sacrifices, beyond spending a few billions.
In some parts of Europe we are beginning to see data protection agencies(yes normally an oxymoron) banning the use of clouds, where parts of the infrastructure is outside of their jurisdiction, for anyone licensed to store sensitive information. because they assume that the authorities of that place will always have access to back doors in the platform. Something that have caused the usual cloudvangalists to accuse them of being anti progress and all the lot.
This is causing some ruckus as school districts want to use google docs and hospitals want to move their IT into the cloud where the unicorns roam and IT is free and easy.
the BP oil spill.
One of the biggest issues in the whole nuclear accident meme thing is that well somehow nuclear accidents are only ever compared to other nuclear accidents. But on a wider scale how dangerous is this compared to similar events hitting conventional energy sources? like oil well or refinery fires.
Chrome like safari is based on the rather old khtml engine(of konqueror fame) that always was fast but tended to do pretty bad when rendering non standard html the way the author intended(and nobody especially google writes standard html) that issue slowly got fixed, and when apple got involved(and it got renamed to webkit), it took off for mainstream use.
Chromes javascript performance along with firefox latest 6x improvement is achived by going from parsed code to compile on load or JIT compilation.
Version numbers are often marketing tools firefox is at triple digit version numbers if you convert it to the scheme chrome uses, it makes little sense to use them as indication of progress.
600 SMS'es on the same cell to the same recipient could cause some interesting effects, especially if multiple carriers are involved. You might see random votes get delayed for longish period of time and you might not get the result within seconds. Email is also set up to allow for delays. It might not be a real problem but dont expect a SMS system to be 110% reliable.
Wireless Ethernet fails a lot more transparent i.e. the voters will get a feedback from the system if their transaction fail, SMS/Email will fail silently i.e. it will not be obvius to the voter if transaction went through.
Wasn't this the MS get the fact showcase as to how much better ms.net and sql server were compared to linux? Before the system came crashing down and latency became an issue?
as I understood it, China has control over the vast majority of media- would the population even need a reason more than whatever the govt told them? eg. they are taking our resources... why bother with copyright?
How exactly was it the current batch of chinese plutocrats took power? did they have a full free press back then?
If things gets to obvuis and the "bread and circus" bribes cant be upheld due to a cash shortages populations tend to support revolts. And history is littered with example of those revolts being more the a small anoyance even if they fail. And they dont always fail, often because the army is tied to close to the general public to be of much use in actual popular revolts.
But there might exist an implicit contract between the owners of the park and the caretakers that they retain a usage right to it.
Road usage is the clear cut case, here you will loose in court if you close off a road that have been open to the public. Ownership or not, particularly if you bought the road as a part of a deal after public usage was an established tradition. Implicit contracts does need to be honored.
The stadium issue, have if i remember correctly been taken to court and the card holders got awarded compensation.
Land ownership is not actually always ownership, there countries(UK and Sweden for instance) where you cannot actually own land, but only lease it on permanent contracts.
This varies a lot from country to country some, like my native Denmark does not treat written contracts as superior to oral or implicit contracts, while some common law countries gives formal contracts preferable treatment. But i dont think that there is a western legal system where implicit contracts is not acknowledged by the courts
On the internet you have the big big problem of determining jurisdiction.
Games are just that games they are run for a purpose with a certain agenda, and in most games that agenda involves a kind of fair play doctrine that requires ingame assets to be tied to ingame actions alone and not subject to out of game financial transactions. Here theres no context of a implicit real world ownership, but this might differ Second life for instance might by encouraging real world trading of ingame assets create such a cotexts, The DNS system is an other example here there are an tradition for treating domains as property that can be treated as real asset.
What im trying to say is that the written ToS isnt the entire story of the contract.
IANYAL but im fairly sure this is a fair attempt at describing the actual law.
the answer to the question would of cause be 42.
ohh dont beleave that cloud computing is here to stay at least until someone comes up with a cooler name for the dusty old mainframes still running the world.
The way you do redudancy may have changed but in the end the goal of a cloud computer is the same as the mainframe process every business transaction on the same central system with no downtime as cheaply as posible.
As with mainframes cloud computers have enough up-front cost that timesharing and leasing models becomes interesting.
Virtualisation is another mainframe virtue, seperate the software stack from the hardware stack and run whole OS's as if they were application level services. No real news here.
Will cloud be dominant, maybe, theres enough big iron stil around for it to be a light transition in most businesses, and with game/media consoles gaining traction over PC'es that were never ever used for much besides the internet anyway it might not be as fun selling pc software as it used to be, but mostly things arent changing that much. the nuts and bolt techs and the software maintainance and training people will still be doing mostly the same theyve always done, development jobs wont change much either. The internet have alwauys been about interconnected timeshares/BBS'es anyway, the browser just brought it to the masses.
You can make all sorts of feedback curcuits with a few transistors(act as termostats) some swicthes, a few resitors a few LM324 ot similar amplifies and maybe some more advanced sensors, this kind of stuff is a few doller a set at a bulk retailer, you can make oscilating lights controled by stuff happening in the room with some diodes again dirt cheap and som RC(resistor capacitor) circuits.
"AND" gates are also avaliable cheaply so you could do all sorts of digital fun aswell.
AIX is still somewhat in support, HP-UX the same no OpenSolaris will be around for decades to come we might see Oracle stop pushing it actively for new customers but you dont kill a prodoct like that not with the price some organisation is willing to pay for sevice and support deals for existing systems.
Sometimes it's not about the strategic game of cat and mouse and all about the cash flow.
The problem with google is the terms of service, google does not offer you full ownership of your data, they wont negotiate out out clauses they dont make guranties and whont offer fixed compensation when guranties are breached, it's the same deal with apple and a big reason apple is non existiant in the business to business market.
Take a standard linux netbook use non google webtools and you can get those deals but google acts the same way apple does and ignores the business market, this is wry this debate is pointless google isnt even trying to enter this market, they are plotting to take the low end consumer market not the enterprise market.
The reason this is being debated is that the fortune 5000 companies are trying to ditch their PC's and go back to the mainframes as fast as they can and google is the most visible of the new timeshare systems, because they are consumer oriented and not enterprise oriented.
Theres other players like zimbra, zoho or thinkfree that specificly targets enterprise and some of the old forgotten giants still lingers around in the shadows.
If someone else is making profit your not getting full value for your money, in the teoreticly perfect free market noone makes big profits, big profit's is actually a sign that the market mechanism does not work.
Nobody made more profit then the big party bosses in the polit buro or the arab kings and sheiks.
Yes but mission critical wintel deployment it's probably a lot more expansive in terms of redudancy and support cost then the older mainframes. when they grow to the scale where mainframes used to live.
Windows biggest drawback stability wise was always that it had none and now only week self protection features, a renegade application will take a wintel host down while a mainframe will remain mostly unaffected by bad application code. With properly tested application code you can make a wintel stable, but thats not all that common in the cloud world where almost everything is perpertual beta and to keep that stable you need a underlying platform who can protect itself the way windows can't. especially if your going to rent out the hardware on a timeshare basis, to almost anyone. Unix/Linux remains as always the middle ground it runs on any hardware(now even clasical mainframes) and gets a lot closer to mainframe like behavior then windows.
When microsoft claims that most windows crashes are due to 3rd party code they are actually right, the only problem is that Windows is the making it damn easy for 3rd party code to take the entire system down.
for what i hear AIM is pretty popular in russia of all places while MS mmore or less dominate here in europe, where yahoo is more or less unknown with local startups and broadcasting companies rule the part of the portal word that have not been killed by facebook and google yet.