>However, once IBM jettisons the PC unit, and a new company takes over it, they will surely want to hang on to the Brand name.
There's no need to keep the brand name.
They just need the ThinkPad trademark like Acer kept TI's product line it acquired in 90's (what was it - Extensa or something? Yes, it is Extensa - http://global.acer.com/about/news.asp?id=166)
And then they can make up some more Think names (ThinkDesk for PCs, ThinkPod for portable music players and so on and so on).
>I just looked on the bottom of my Thinkpad. It sings to me these words: "Manufactured for IBM Corperation; Armonk New York, USA; Made In China". Where was that point you were making? I can't seem to find it.
1. The point, as it says in the guy's post, is that Legend makes crappy products so Legend ThinkPads would crap out in a year or two. 2. China is a country, not a division of Legend Inc. or something like that. 3. I am quite certain that low-end (if not all) IBM ThinkPad models are manufactured by LG or Taiwanese companies; the fact that assembly is done in China is no big deal as long as the guys who manage it aren't clueless.
> I think if they only allow 1 click per IP to count (during a time period, like 1 click per IP per week or something),
Then when I search for something I wanna buy and five ads come up on the side, I can click on only one link and come back an hour (or a week) later?
>And Google can keep track of any ad-user that tries to pull this by cooperating with antivirus software makers: if a fake click for company X is found in a virus, just cut company X from the program.
The problem is that people probably write software like Lycos'es "Make Love Not Spam" - distributed bots that make IP tracking impossible. Not to mention spyware (I don't know if it exists yet, but it should 'cause the idea is good) that can do that 24hrs/day for you from millions of infected PCs.
> Sure I can, but it's not a startup, it's a resume. The virtual machine is never rebooted.
Cool - interesting problem!
Maybe you can script that from the Windows host. a) I think there is an API that lets you do things to virtual machine from outside. Maybe the API is for Virtual Server only, I'm not sure. b) You can create a short Windows script that will ping virtual environment's IP, then do an if-then. If the environment is down, and a scheduled job X does not exist, create a Windows scheduled job X (retry on failure) to login to the Linux guest OS and issue the log archiving command. That should be much easier from Cygwin (at least for me), especially if you could fix up passwordless logon (via SSH) between the two environments - then you could write your script either in Cygwin or in Linux - do a simple checkpoint on each successful ping, rotate log if last checkpoing is >5 minutes or something suchlike.
> if you read the article you would find out MS makes Connectix, which is appearently marketed under the "virtual server" brand, competition to VMWare.
And if you read news you would have found out that Connectix is a name of the Virtual PC maker acquired by Microsoft.
>another "watch out" is if linux gets GPL "virtualization software", people could be more responsive to switch to linux.
UML is OS virtualization software for Linux released under GPL.
>If they already own their windows licenses, they would be able to run all the programs they currently run, and make the movement from windows to linux in smaller steps.
If they already own Windows licenses, they could run (free) Cygwin today and move to Linux in smaller steps.
>Maybe today they just run new apps in linux, and tommorow they start moving from virtualized office to native OO.org.
Native OO.org runs just as good under non-virtualized Windows OS (Windows version of OO.org, of course).
> My only problem is that them (sic!) darned logs don't get rotated when expected because the host machine is down:)
Can't you write a script to run on startup (put it in rc.local or something) that will check if logs have been rotated (or to just rotate logs on startup no matter what)? That shouldn't be a hard thing to do.
>What do you as an IT professional want to read in a review for a server OS or a high-speed switch, or a big iron server or proprietary workstation?
As an IT pro, my opinion doesn't matter. Purchase of big iron is rarely decided by the so-called IT professional. It is a complex process that involves financing, the application guys, database vendor, office politics, etc. and hence should not depend (solely) on input of IT professionals. For example, if you buy an iSeries server, maybe IBM will give you a big discount on DB2, so whether or not the server has logical partitioning won't be a big deal - you'll be able to buy couple of Itanium 2 servers with VMWare from the money saved on Oracle 10g EE...
Secondly, as those servers are highly specialized, comparing them is like comparing apples and oranges. Sure enough, if you wonder which server would be the best for Oracle apps, you can probably get TPC figures and compare those, but then you don't need a review, do you? Alternatively you want it for a specific application (or existing environment) which exists only on Sun - why on earth would you want to read a review of Superdome or its comparision with E15K?
Thirdly, if you can't trust your UNIX vendor, then better don't buy UNIX. If you do, don't pay too much attention to reviews.
It's simple - say there's 5% h/w maintenance charge (year). If you have 100 servers you pay 5 servers/year in maintenance money. If you just buy new servers and junk the failed ones, you can afford a 5% yearly failure rate (or even higher, if you sell the failed servers for parts). Plus you constantly keep upgrading without keeping outdated CPUs...
>6. DNA mapping via AI can predict propensities and remove the need to test at all....or you can build an AI flower that changes color when breathed on and use it instead.
Couple of months ago there was a piece of news on a U.K. lab that uses robots (i.e. mechanical arms) for "brute-force" research - they just mix random stuff at 10x (or more, don't remember any more) the speed of a human lab researcher, run tests and select "qualified" results for verification by senior resarchers... Imagine research 10 years from now... One office assistant, five scientists and 100 robots.
Re:Welcome to capitalism
on
HIV Vaccine
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· Score: 1
>hey, I'm happy to pay through taxes if the research all goes into the public domain.
One way or another, money makes money, you'd have to pay more for something else (in your example, you'd have to pay higher tax as no private money would be used for R&D).
I for one am not willing/interested in financing R&D that would end up in public domain. Say you pay $200 a year (in taxes) to finance pubic domain research. I'd prefer to choose a public company and invest those $200 in their shares. I don't believe some bureaucrat will make better decision than the stock market. I've sold stuff to the government/public orgs - those guys are bloody wasters!
It's like buying life insurance - if you plan to die, you want to pay. If you don't give a damn, you save that money or spend it somewhere else.
Re:Welcome to capitalism
on
HIV Vaccine
·
· Score: 1
Well, someone has to pay.
"The government" doesn't print money out of nothing - it collects taxes from companies and individuals (including the guys who commercialize university research).
> Go after the big guy first and the others will be afraid to fight. That worked so well in gradeschool.
Yeah, right. Considering the source (Anonymous Coward, for Christ's sake!), this not only is not insightful, it is also quite incredulous.
Now about these XO guys: "The average data rate these business sites support is less than 200 kilobytes per second, and they control that with gear that commonly costs thousands of dollars."
That illustrates the idea that businesses do NOT care about KBps (otherwise they would have been routing en masse using Windows or Linux already) but a bunch of other features which the XO guys will take forever to catch up on. And probably the key stuff is protected by patents anyway.
Small companies and poor bastards - sure, I use Linux for routing myself. But if you're a big company and have millions of dollars made (or lost) every day based on good functioning of VOIP or iSCSI service - you can't be serious to do that on non-Tier 1 vendor's hardware. So yea, in couple of years the XO guys will kill off deadbeat low-end vendors, but hitting on the schoolyard bully... Good luck with that! Last time I checked, mySQL wasn't competing with Oracle head-to-head.
There was that promising Zebra project - whatever happened to that one?
> But trust me, if you write any number of messages, learning the new way is worth it.
Really? See, such clever (even patronizing) analysis like yours is the reason people dislike predictive texting. The designers are smart and the users are stupid? If they actually considered what people need, they wouldn't have made it that way. (And it's not only that - it's quite unbelievable how bad phone software is, despite the fact how many generations of phones we've been thru).
I use a lot of swear words, foreign words (both missing from the dictionary) and SMS slang/code which beats crap out of that shitty on-the-fly spellchecker. Predictive texting is indeed useless for many, if not most, users.
>What means of enhancing intelligence do count as "artificial" - as opposed to "natural"?
By artificial I meant controlled, or induced by genetic, biomechanical or other engineering. By natural I meant random (gene mutations, etc.).
>Or should the line between "artificial" and "natural" be drawn at deliberate genetic alterations?
I didn't mean to draw a line - I admit that is a complicated issue which I haven't made up my mind on. I just wanted to say "stupidity" referred to by that post could be "cured" (if it can be considered illness that needs treatment).
> As long as the resulting creatures are kept isolated from the general population of creatures, such a "mutation" is highly unlikely to infect the general population with abnormal genes.
That's the whole problem - they said that about genetically modified corps and couple years later they've discovered that isolation is impossible.
>The problem is a philosophical one, because we can't offer these advances to everyone. We must decide who is important and who is not.
That decision should not be made (everone is important), but it will be - and that is the problem.
>The human species has not had real natural selection for a long time because we do not die from genetic problems as often.
Wasn't that Hitler's reason for eliminating the disabled/ill?
>Stupid people are having more children than smart people, therefore people are going to get stupider.
You can't generalize like that - some smart (and/or rich) people have a bunch of kids. But at least they provide for them, whereas taxpayers have to pay up for "breeders" (weird term, saw it somewhere on the Net) who have more kids than they can afford. I don't know, though, how ethical would it be to limit reproduction based on economic status (or IQ level) of potential parents.
Personally I'm only upset about the unjust taxation, but taxation has never been just anyway.
In couple of years we should be able to artificially enhance IQ in humans, so overall we should improve. But with continous advancement of robotics and AI, I wonder if 15 years later human reproduction will make sense as having kids could become not economically viable.
To me there's no difference between movies and games - both do what they can to entertain or express author's message. With movies you can't make it interactive (well they could shoot a gazillion possible scenarios so that you could "tip the scales" and take the movie in some particular direction, but for all practical purposes it's there to be shown while people watch). With games it's interactive but still quite primitive and non-realistic compared to real actors/movies. Each of them is bad at what the other one does well and they can't help it yet.
In the future (say 15 years from now) we'll probably see the two merge - movies that contain computerized renderings of real people and bots with AI which will be able to "makes movies on the fly" depending on interaction from the viewer. Or movie-like games with on-the-fly generated plots and characters that look like your friends, enemies, bosses, etc. At that point there won't be much difference between them.
Even better, in 20 years there ought to be "personal movie bots" that will make movies automatically based on AI movie director programs and a combination of one's personal preferences (values, education, things one likes, etc.), daily experiences, people one likes and dislikes, etc.
> if it was Linux / Unix the sensible thing would be boot via PXE > rolling back would then be a relatively simple process
Windows can boot from PXE just as good as any UNIX.
To boot 60K computers via PXE you'd need about 1000 boot servers (at least - if one boots 60 systems from each boot server which is probably too high a ratio - 20:1 sounds more reasonable unless you never shut down those 60K systems i.e. they reboot only ocasionally and at random intervals).
Also, deploying to 60K systems wasn't the idea anyway - someone chose "Deploy to All" instead of "Deploy to Selected Systems" which were only seven.
> I think we can all say with certainty, that any OS based on latin script, along with (still largely) latin based keyboards and paradigms, which dominates in south east asia, will lead only to a great wailing and a gnashing of teeth
Wrong. Linux supports Thai and other Asian languages including double-byte languages of East Asia. There's nothing wrong with "English" keyboards and scripts, people LOVE English in Asia. And it's easier to remember. And it's easier to search the web for "kernel make" than for "hexin anzhuang" as you get many more results.
>Perhaps what is really needed is for south east asia to develop an OS based on their written and syntactic paradigms, rather that a latin based left to right, 26 letters, scheme.
No, it's fine the way it is now.
> I hear chinese language support in linux is coming along. But what about the input issue?
What input "issue"? Chinese has over 10 input methods, other languages are just fine too.
>The best thing Intel could do to win customers would be to try to develop such a solution
Yeah, right - for who? For AMD's el-cheapo system for Asian market? Why would they do that? All they need is to make sure the Indian guys they outsourced driver writing do their job, and that Chinese manufacturers (actually Taiwanese, in China) know where to get those drivers.
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>However, once IBM jettisons the PC unit, and a new company takes over it, they will surely want to hang on to the Brand name.
There's no need to keep the brand name.
They just need the ThinkPad trademark like Acer kept TI's product line it acquired in 90's (what was it - Extensa or something? Yes, it is Extensa - http://global.acer.com/about/news.asp?id=166)
And then they can make up some more Think names (ThinkDesk for PCs, ThinkPod for portable music players and so on and so on).
>I just looked on the bottom of my Thinkpad. It sings to me these words: "Manufactured for IBM Corperation; Armonk New York, USA; Made In China". Where was that point you were making? I can't seem to find it.
1. The point, as it says in the guy's post, is that Legend makes crappy products so Legend ThinkPads would crap out in a year or two.
2. China is a country, not a division of Legend Inc. or something like that.
3. I am quite certain that low-end (if not all) IBM ThinkPad models are manufactured by LG or Taiwanese companies; the fact that assembly is done in China is no big deal as long as the guys who manage it aren't clueless.
> I think if they only allow 1 click per IP to count (during a time period, like 1 click per IP per week or something),
Then when I search for something I wanna buy and five ads come up on the side, I can click on only one link and come back an hour (or a week) later?
>And Google can keep track of any ad-user that tries to pull this by cooperating with antivirus software makers: if a fake click for company X is found in a virus, just cut company X from the program.
The problem is that people probably write software like Lycos'es "Make Love Not Spam" - distributed bots that make IP tracking impossible. Not to mention spyware (I don't know if it exists yet, but it should 'cause the idea is good) that can do that 24hrs/day for you from millions of infected PCs.
>The sad reality, however, is most likely that the companies we all love (Google, Apple, etc) are still in the business of making money first,
Better sad than sorry - the other guys are out of business.
> Sure I can, but it's not a startup, it's a resume. The virtual machine is never rebooted.
Cool - interesting problem!
Maybe you can script that from the Windows host.
a) I think there is an API that lets you do things to virtual machine from outside.
Maybe the API is for Virtual Server only, I'm not sure.
b) You can create a short Windows script that will ping virtual environment's IP, then do an if-then. If the environment is down, and a scheduled job X does not exist, create a Windows scheduled job X (retry on failure) to login to the Linux guest OS and issue the log archiving command.
That should be much easier from Cygwin (at least for me), especially if you could fix up passwordless logon (via SSH) between the two environments - then you could write your script either in Cygwin or in Linux - do a simple checkpoint on each successful ping, rotate log if last checkpoing is >5 minutes or something suchlike.
The grandparent post is a troll.
> if you read the article you would find out MS makes Connectix, which is appearently marketed under the "virtual server" brand, competition to VMWare.
And if you read news you would have found out that Connectix is a name of the Virtual PC maker acquired by Microsoft.
>another "watch out" is if linux gets GPL "virtualization software", people could be more responsive to switch to linux.
UML is OS virtualization software for Linux released under GPL.
>If they already own their windows licenses, they would be able to run all the programs they currently run, and make the movement from windows to linux in smaller steps.
If they already own Windows licenses, they could run (free) Cygwin today and move to Linux in smaller steps.
>Maybe today they just run new apps in linux, and tommorow they start moving from virtualized office to native OO.org.
Native OO.org runs just as good under non-virtualized Windows OS (Windows version of OO.org, of course).
> It involves burning servers heating the atmosphere and such...
Bloody overclockers!
> My only problem is that them (sic!) darned logs don't get rotated when expected because the host machine is down :)
Can't you write a script to run on startup (put it in rc.local or something) that will check if logs have been rotated (or to just rotate logs on startup no matter what)?
That shouldn't be a hard thing to do.
His idea is pointless.
>What do you as an IT professional want to read in a review for a server OS or a high-speed switch, or a big iron server or proprietary workstation?
As an IT pro, my opinion doesn't matter. Purchase of big iron is rarely decided by the so-called IT professional. It is a complex process that involves financing, the application guys, database vendor, office politics, etc. and hence should not depend (solely) on input of IT professionals. For example, if you buy an iSeries server, maybe IBM will give you a big discount on DB2, so whether or not the server has logical partitioning won't be a big deal - you'll be able to buy couple of Itanium 2 servers with VMWare from the money saved on Oracle 10g EE...
Secondly, as those servers are highly specialized, comparing them is like comparing apples and oranges.
Sure enough, if you wonder which server would be the best for Oracle apps, you can probably get TPC figures and compare those, but then you don't need a review, do you?
Alternatively you want it for a specific application (or existing environment) which exists only on Sun - why on earth would you want to read a review of Superdome or its comparision with E15K?
Thirdly, if you can't trust your UNIX vendor, then better don't buy UNIX. If you do, don't pay too much attention to reviews.
It's simple - say there's 5% h/w maintenance charge (year).
If you have 100 servers you pay 5 servers/year in maintenance money.
If you just buy new servers and junk the failed ones, you can afford a 5% yearly failure rate (or even higher, if you sell the failed servers for parts). Plus you constantly keep upgrading without keeping outdated CPUs...
>6. DNA mapping via AI can predict propensities and remove the need to test at all....or you can build an AI flower that changes color when breathed on and use it instead.
Couple of months ago there was a piece of news on a U.K. lab that uses robots (i.e. mechanical arms) for "brute-force" research - they just mix random stuff at 10x (or more, don't remember any more) the speed of a human lab researcher, run tests and select "qualified" results for verification by senior resarchers...
Imagine research 10 years from now... One office assistant, five scientists and 100 robots.
>hey, I'm happy to pay through taxes if the research all goes into the public domain.
One way or another, money makes money, you'd have to pay more for something else (in your example, you'd have to pay higher tax as no private money would be used for R&D).
I for one am not willing/interested in financing R&D that would end up in public domain.
Say you pay $200 a year (in taxes) to finance pubic domain research.
I'd prefer to choose a public company and invest those $200 in their shares. I don't believe some bureaucrat will make better decision than the stock market. I've sold stuff to the government/public orgs - those guys are bloody wasters!
It's like buying life insurance - if you plan to die, you want to pay. If you don't give a damn, you save that money or spend it somewhere else.
Well, someone has to pay.
"The government" doesn't print money out of nothing - it collects taxes from companies and individuals (including the guys who commercialize university research).
> Go after the big guy first and the others will be afraid to fight. That worked so well in gradeschool.
Yeah, right.
Considering the source (Anonymous Coward, for Christ's sake!), this not only is not insightful, it is also quite incredulous.
Now about these XO guys: "The average data rate these business sites support is less than 200 kilobytes per second, and they control that with gear that commonly costs thousands of dollars."
That illustrates the idea that businesses do NOT care about KBps (otherwise they would have been routing en masse using Windows or Linux already) but a bunch of other features which the XO guys will take forever to catch up on. And probably the key stuff is protected by patents anyway.
Small companies and poor bastards - sure, I use Linux for routing myself. But if you're a big company and have millions of dollars made (or lost) every day based on good functioning of VOIP or iSCSI service - you can't be serious to do that on non-Tier 1 vendor's hardware. So yea, in couple of years the XO guys will kill off deadbeat low-end vendors, but hitting on the schoolyard bully... Good luck with that!
Last time I checked, mySQL wasn't competing with Oracle head-to-head.
There was that promising Zebra project - whatever happened to that one?
> But trust me, if you write any number of messages, learning the new way is worth it.
Really? See, such clever (even patronizing) analysis like yours is the reason people dislike predictive texting. The designers are smart and the users are stupid?
If they actually considered what people need, they wouldn't have made it that way. (And it's not only that - it's quite unbelievable how bad phone software is, despite the fact how many generations of phones we've been thru).
I use a lot of swear words, foreign words (both missing from the dictionary) and SMS slang/code which beats crap out of that shitty on-the-fly spellchecker. Predictive texting is indeed useless for many, if not most, users.
Yes, that's likely.
;-)
And that only emphasizes how efficiently written is a popular kernel - it was coded by a sing.. oh, well...
>What means of enhancing intelligence do count as "artificial" - as opposed to "natural"?
By artificial I meant controlled, or induced by genetic, biomechanical or other engineering.
By natural I meant random (gene mutations, etc.).
>Or should the line between "artificial" and "natural" be drawn at deliberate genetic alterations?
I didn't mean to draw a line - I admit that is a complicated issue which I haven't made up my mind on.
I just wanted to say "stupidity" referred to by that post could be "cured" (if it can be considered illness that needs treatment).
> As long as the resulting creatures are kept isolated from the general population of creatures, such a "mutation" is highly unlikely to infect the general population with abnormal genes.
That's the whole problem - they said that about genetically modified corps and couple years later they've discovered that isolation is impossible.
>The problem is a philosophical one, because we can't offer these advances to everyone. We must decide who is important and who is not.
That decision should not be made (everone is important), but it will be - and that is the problem.
>The human species has not had real natural selection for a long time because we do not die from genetic problems as often.
Wasn't that Hitler's reason for eliminating the disabled/ill?
>Stupid people are having more children than smart people, therefore people are going to get stupider.
You can't generalize like that - some smart (and/or rich) people have a bunch of kids. But at least they provide for them, whereas taxpayers have to pay up for "breeders" (weird term, saw it somewhere on the Net) who have more kids than they can afford.
I don't know, though, how ethical would it be to limit reproduction based on economic status (or IQ level) of potential parents.
Personally I'm only upset about the unjust taxation, but taxation has never been just anyway.
In couple of years we should be able to artificially enhance IQ in humans, so overall we should improve.
But with continous advancement of robotics and AI, I wonder if 15 years later human reproduction will make sense as having kids could become not economically viable.
How will this affect evolution???
Let me ask you this - how will this affect OUTSOURCING?
Gives a whole new meaning to "code monkey"....
>They're just adding more useless traffic, in the name of justice
How is that? Spammers' traffic will be reduced in proportion of traffic generated by screensavers.
A Beowulf of those!
(could I have given a stupider answer than that?)
Very interesting post!
To me there's no difference between movies and games - both do what they can to entertain or express author's message.
With movies you can't make it interactive (well they could shoot a gazillion possible scenarios so that you could "tip the scales" and take the movie in some particular direction, but for all practical purposes it's there to be shown while people watch).
With games it's interactive but still quite primitive and non-realistic compared to real actors/movies.
Each of them is bad at what the other one does well and they can't help it yet.
In the future (say 15 years from now) we'll probably see the two merge - movies that contain computerized renderings of real people and bots with AI which will be able to "makes movies on the fly" depending on interaction from the viewer. Or movie-like games with on-the-fly generated plots and characters that look like your friends, enemies, bosses, etc. At that point there won't be much difference between them.
Even better, in 20 years there ought to be "personal movie bots" that will make movies automatically based on AI movie director programs and a combination of one's personal preferences (values, education, things one likes, etc.), daily experiences, people one likes and dislikes, etc.
> if it was Linux / Unix the sensible thing would be boot via PXE
> rolling back would then be a relatively simple process
Windows can boot from PXE just as good as any UNIX.
To boot 60K computers via PXE you'd need about 1000 boot servers (at least - if one boots 60 systems from each boot server which is probably too high a ratio - 20:1 sounds more reasonable unless you never shut down those 60K systems i.e. they reboot only ocasionally and at random intervals).
Also, deploying to 60K systems wasn't the idea anyway - someone chose "Deploy to All" instead of "Deploy to Selected Systems" which were only seven.
Where exactly did you get that (mis)info, man?
Here are some thruths:
> I think we can all say with certainty, that any OS based on latin script, along with (still largely) latin based keyboards and paradigms, which dominates in south east asia, will lead only to a great wailing and a gnashing of teeth
Wrong. Linux supports Thai and other Asian languages including double-byte languages of East Asia. There's nothing wrong with "English" keyboards and scripts, people LOVE English in Asia. And it's easier to remember. And it's easier to search the web for "kernel make" than for "hexin anzhuang" as you get many more results.
>Perhaps what is really needed is for south east asia to develop an OS based on their written and syntactic paradigms, rather that a latin based left to right, 26 letters, scheme.
No, it's fine the way it is now.
> I hear chinese language support in linux is coming along. But what about the input issue?
What input "issue"?
Chinese has over 10 input methods, other languages are just fine too.
>The best thing Intel could do to win customers would be to try to develop such a solution
Yeah, right - for who? For AMD's el-cheapo system for Asian market? Why would they do that?
All they need is to make sure the Indian guys they outsourced driver writing do their job, and that Chinese manufacturers (actually Taiwanese, in China) know where to get those drivers.