I would imagine the main reason there haven't been more experiments is simply due to the risk to a patient's health if something goes wrong, especially in today's litigous society. Given the choice, would you rather fly a patient (or surgeon) to the right place at a cost of say £5,000 or would you rather risk the £1m settlement if it all goes horribly wrong over a videolink?
However, I do believe there is a lot to be said for these kinds of ideas, and they are gradually taking off but I reckon it'll be a while before they achieve enough credibility to become the norm rather than the occassional events like this.
I broke my ankle at the end of April and so had to keep my ankle elevated which pretty much ruled out normal computing at a desk. However, I'd bought a PS/2 not long before so I stretched out on the sofa, plopped my ankle on a cushion and played SSX Tricky for about a fortnight!
Aside from that, I've got one of those papasan chairs (here's a link to a picture of one) which is very comfortable and nice for "splatting" in for a gaming session.
Counterpoint: you almost always have your mobile with you. Now, say you're stuck in a bus queue, or actually on the bus and want to kill some time. Damn, your GBA is at home, but with modern phones, you can pull it out of your pocket (NO! I meant the phone!) and start playing (yes, I really, really meant the phone!).
While it might not be as good at games as a GBA or similar, in many cases it's "good enough". I remember playing games for hours on a Spectrum which had much less power than one of these!
Yuppers; however, Scotland isn't universally cheap; two of the most expensive places to live are Aberdeen (because of North Sea oil) and Edinburgh (it's the capital and the recent devlolved parliment has increased demand). Most of rural Scotland is pretty cheap, so you should be able to find something.
As Tomah4wk says, London/SE is still the most expensive, although just going West or North of the M25 usually gets you into a saner cost bracket.
Ditto; I can access the same mail from Windows, linux through a variety of clients (I've used Mozilla, Outhouse, Kmail and Evolution already) and even from a web browser via Imp. I set up IMAP at my last work, as it allowed the same level of access to a cross-platform environment (Solaris/Windows).
Which is why they're trying to find a sign which will indicate the danger to a civilisation in 5000 years' time which can't read english. I don't have a link handy, but IIRC it was discussed on/. before.
I always end up converting it into 1 mile = 1 minute as the speed limit in the UK is 60mph (or 70 on motorways/dual carriageways). This works pretty well; 120 miles = 2 hours, more or less.
Of course, this blows up if you drive at 90mph down the motorway. Not that I would ever do that, nosirree!:)
I'm not as sure as you seem to be that the Xbox will have a larger game selection. Added to this, in 3 years time, there will be better consoles (MS or not) which means that the Xbox will be looking dated and will only be worth the $50 it will be sold at, i.e. it'll be about the same value.
In any event, the point is that an old console is still selling well despite their being better consoles out there, which is the point I was trying to make.
Hrm, aren't PS1s still selling despite "something much much better" being available now? Perhaps that's died off a little, but ISTR that the PS1 was selling better than the Xbox, certainly in Japan (but that's a weird market anyway...).
IIRC, it was about a dozen when I first tried it, but that was 6-7 years ago. Dunno what it's like now, I'm afraid as after that, I didn't use Linux for a few years and tried Redhat for a bit before sticking to Debian, mainly because of apt-get:)
Please don't take this as an excuse for a distro flamewar; some people prefer Redhat/Suse/Mandrake/whatever, I'm happy with Debian.
They're shutting down all netcafe's pending fire regulation testing. Of course, they now have the opportunity to delay this testing and potentially keep them closed.
It only takes a little cynicism to take the view that this is an opportunity for China to shut down something they don't like. To be honest, does one fire in one cybercafe really justify the closure of all such establishments?
Yup, and you could also load all the data onto hard drive if you had one big enough. I did this with BG2 when it came out, as I've now got a 40GB drive (10GB NTFS for XP, 10GB FAT shared and 20GB linux) and space wasn't a problem.
I'd assume it would be slightly faster due to the increased bandwidth (i.e. it takes less time to transmit x bytes). However, it would depend on your requirements as to whether latency or bandwidth are your priority when you choose a transport.
The main clusters to benefit would be ones like Beowulf which tend to use "commodity" hardware (not that 10Gbps is commodity... yet!).
As others have pointed out, this is irrelevant for "average" PCs. Where it comes in useful is for high-end servers, network backbones and (possibly) clusters which throw a lot of data around.
One word: striping. If you put enough disks in, you can get more than 1gbps out of a disk array. Realistically, though, you're limited to using this in two places:
Large server with many, many disk controllers and even more disks
Network backbones
It'll creep in to the second quickly enough (once Cisco et al support it in hardware), I'd imagine (we already have a 4gbps backbone using 4 gigabit lines in our site) and the former will start happening at the top-end installations of E15K's and the like.
Have to agree with extra88 here; we have 10TB of storage in a cluster and the RAID-5 aspect hasn't been a problem. Some of the cluster software has been a bit flaky, but that would have been a problem with if we'd mirrored.
Yup, this is by far the best way of doing it; centralised storage can be RAID protected and accessed from anywhere. A local hard disk is an SPOF (Single Point Of Failure) and can only be accessed at that station. You can also add security to the equation; all data on workstations should be viewed as insecure; centrally stored data can be password protected.
You HAVE to enforce this; put a policy in place that all critical data must be stored on the central server; any locally stored data is not your responsibility and cannot be recovered.
With that done, set up your backups with relevant retention/rotation and go from there.
The only possible spanner is if you have a slow network and the users need large files and they complain about performance. In that case, use the "My Documents" folder and centrally store the network profiles; that way they'll get written to the server on logout and can be backed up as normal.
Dunno if Oracle's really an option for you, but I do know that you can have a fallback database set up which is 0-15 minutes (exact delay depends on configuration) behind the 'live' one. This uses the archive logs to apply updates to the backup DB. It's normally used for high availability (i.e. when the live dies, you switch to the fallback which is almost up to date) but might help here.
The main problem is that if you change the dev copy of data, you'll have to rebuild it from scratch unless you can rollback.
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However, I do believe there is a lot to be said for these kinds of ideas, and they are gradually taking off but I reckon it'll be a while before they achieve enough credibility to become the norm rather than the occassional events like this.
Aside from that, I've got one of those papasan chairs (here's a link to a picture of one) which is very comfortable and nice for "splatting" in for a gaming session.
While it might not be as good at games as a GBA or similar, in many cases it's "good enough". I remember playing games for hours on a Spectrum which had much less power than one of these!
Yeah, but "subject" implies a certain level of respect not granted to mere employee scum.
As Tomah4wk says, London/SE is still the most expensive, although just going West or North of the M25 usually gets you into a saner cost bracket.
Ditto; I can access the same mail from Windows, linux through a variety of clients (I've used Mozilla, Outhouse, Kmail and Evolution already) and even from a web browser via Imp. I set up IMAP at my last work, as it allowed the same level of access to a cross-platform environment (Solaris/Windows).
Pity I have to use IE at work, although installing Mozilla keeps getting more and more tempting...
Which is why they're trying to find a sign which will indicate the danger to a civilisation in 5000 years' time which can't read english. I don't have a link handy, but IIRC it was discussed on /. before.
Of course, this blows up if you drive at 90mph down the motorway. Not that I would ever do that, nosirree! :)
Probably the owners of another rooted box...
In any event, the point is that an old console is still selling well despite their being better consoles out there, which is the point I was trying to make.
Hrm, aren't PS1s still selling despite "something much much better" being available now? Perhaps that's died off a little, but ISTR that the PS1 was selling better than the Xbox, certainly in Japan (but that's a weird market anyway...).
Please don't take this as an excuse for a distro flamewar; some people prefer Redhat/Suse/Mandrake/whatever, I'm happy with Debian.
If you have a windows driver with a PPD file, drop that into /usr/share/cups/model and restart cups. You can use that as a driver.
It only takes a little cynicism to take the view that this is an opportunity for China to shut down something they don't like. To be honest, does one fire in one cybercafe really justify the closure of all such establishments?
Yup, and you could also load all the data onto hard drive if you had one big enough. I did this with BG2 when it came out, as I've now got a 40GB drive (10GB NTFS for XP, 10GB FAT shared and 20GB linux) and space wasn't a problem.
Silicon Valley: the only place where men meet to boast about who has the smallest.
Does that mean that we should get money back for Windows as it's a rehash of stuff others have done before? ;)
The main clusters to benefit would be ones like Beowulf which tend to use "commodity" hardware (not that 10Gbps is commodity... yet!).
As others have pointed out, this is irrelevant for "average" PCs. Where it comes in useful is for high-end servers, network backbones and (possibly) clusters which throw a lot of data around.
- Large server with many, many disk controllers and even more disks
- Network backbones
It'll creep in to the second quickly enough (once Cisco et al support it in hardware), I'd imagine (we already have a 4gbps backbone using 4 gigabit lines in our site) and the former will start happening at the top-end installations of E15K's and the like.Have to agree with extra88 here; we have 10TB of storage in a cluster and the RAID-5 aspect hasn't been a problem. Some of the cluster software has been a bit flaky, but that would have been a problem with if we'd mirrored.
You HAVE to enforce this; put a policy in place that all critical data must be stored on the central server; any locally stored data is not your responsibility and cannot be recovered.
With that done, set up your backups with relevant retention/rotation and go from there.
The only possible spanner is if you have a slow network and the users need large files and they complain about performance. In that case, use the "My Documents" folder and centrally store the network profiles; that way they'll get written to the server on logout and can be backed up as normal.
Nah, he at least had a chance of success...
The main problem is that if you change the dev copy of data, you'll have to rebuild it from scratch unless you can rollback.