"Where the technology does have great applications is among Fibre-to-the-Building deployments in commercial areas.
"You might have fibre connected from the DSLAM to the basement of an office building," Goodwin said. "You can then run bonded VDSL2+ up into all the other floors.""
Apparently it's cheaper to roll out fibre to the home these days for new installs and the existing copper to the home is insufficient for last mile where there is fibre to the street (junction)...so looks like it's great for business use or specific regions which fit into some window of installation where they put in redundant copper to the home with fibre to the street.
You'll find that unfortunately your experience so far is not new, nor uncommon... most people don't teach themselves anything, they are more than happy to continue with the lot life gave them, complaining about it the whole time and expecting someone else to step in and improve it.
It's always been that way and will continue for the rest of humanity. Sad but true.
I'm not a college grad but do have to travel several times a year for my job to work with clients on strategy. Domestic and International.... neither of which is very fun... not un-fun exactly, just not fun and I have a fun job.
Skype or GoToMeeting are much more effective 90% of the time, cost 90% less money and everyone is happier when it's something that can be done remotely.
These college grads need to realize that travel is a huge waste of energy and time... something which cuts into their effectiveness and can upset their personal life dramatically. Sure it sounds like fun to go abroad frequently - the reality is that you don't get to pick when, where or for how long... that's not a business trip, it's a vacation. Work travel is mostly early mornings, long meetings and boring plane rides... punctuated by a hangover your second day out (why does everyone feel the need to do shots when they travel?).
SO... save your money and plan a trip using your vacation time. You'll enjoy it even more after the anticipation of having planned it...
It's not 'wrongdoing' at all... it could be taking a stance on the environment or speaking up about how the open source philosophy is so much better for the world... it's that 'morality' is subjective and has nothing to do with running a business.
No, Management could care less whether you are 'up to no good' or trying to save the planet, as long as the end result is legal profit for their bottom line. Whatever your motives are... don't tell them, just show the pretty chart where money starts falling from the sky and into their wallets.
Yes, but at least for now, it's only available for an iPhone - where SMS is not a profit mechanism (at least not in the way other plans had it set up). Additionally other providers are starting to offer unlimited SMS plans in exchange for customer loyalty... so the SMS profit model will be drying up soon anyways.
True but insurance covers this scenario. SO yes, I'd 'waste' my money on insurance - because when they did figure out that I hadn't stolen the vehicle and I got to have my day in court - I'd sue everyone involved and make out like a bandit.
In fact getting insurance in that scenario is the key to a huge pay day.. ie: stickin it to the man. Without insurance I'm just another statistic and a patsy as well (what better "proof" is there that someone is responsible for an accident than their lack of insurance - it's almost like they were "planning" to get into an accident).
Uh, read the article.. it's about a volcanic lake with a weak natural form which allows for CO2 gas to leak from the magma beneath to the lake.
What does that have to do with a hand picked reservoir audited for safe storage of CO2?
We'd have to go out of our way to select such a poor choice as directly beneath a lake... then heat up all the rock around it somehow so as to weaken and make porous the natural barrier, and then not do anything about it until the build up of leaked gas is so great that it has to explode into the atmosphere.
Yes it does sound like a made for TV disaster flick...
Desalination technology has actually advanced to the point where this would be a non-issue with plentiful energy.
The most populace cities of the world are on the coasts. Take the demand pressure away from these cities with desalination and everyone else will have a plentiful supply of natural fresh water.
Religious factions are vying for a scarce resource as well... mind share. Add in the fact that any group once established MUST compete for natural resources and you're back to square one.
If you watched the Parody video for 'surface' you can skip this post...
SO rather than improve upon the interfaces that we have, everybody is looking for something brand new so that all the software and hardware we've already bought and learned how to use effectively can be flushed down the toilet and we can buy all new technology, which is slower, less efficient and requires re-learning everything. Great. Go Humanity.
All I want is a tactile touch surface for my laptop... use that morphing technology from the Intel cellphone article (yes it's several posts in the future)... and make me a touch screen / pad that can change shape subtly so I can have a 'keyboard', a 'notepad' a 'game pad' and a whole lot of slightly different touch interfaces that are customized for the application I'm running.
We don't need new ways to interact, we just need to enhance the existing interactions. As another poster mentioned, we are built to use our hands to manipulate our world, our eyes, ears and other sensory organs observe these manipulations and our brain has specialized libraries for reacting via our hands that we don't even have to think about, once trained they just happen.
So inventors/researchers... stop trying to change the world completely... start trying to make the world better by enhancing what already works. Yes for the last time, I really do need 'a better mousetrap', so start building.
If you need to make something really new, research/invent better materials to work with so someone else can use them to create devices people want.
Have you payed your $100 yet? I think you're missing one step... which is not the 'become a developer' part.. it's the 'become a distributor' part... which is what the articles should say.
Anyone can become a developer without a license etc. etc. but to become a distributor you need Apple's blessing and a contract, which appears to be taking longer and longer to get.
I was very busy at 5 - 8 building Transformers out of anything I could get my hands on. Legos at first, then Matboard, tape, glue, then balsa wood with servos and hobby remotes... I built cars and planes too... and hot air balloons and rubber band powered machines with gears and springs to enhance/distribute the power.
Secure P2P with a friends list... yeah, people will be setting up those pay to play web pages where you have to get a password by signing up for a pron account in no time....
I'm certain that Hulu at least has tried to get international distribution... most likely it is because the organization which holds the rights to that is not interested.... often each country will have a company which has previously negotiated distribution rights for various content. The details of these contracts are likely very convoluted due to some special circumstance.
I can imagine a scenario where a media company gives some other media company distribution rights to general content so that they can get Brittany Spears concerts approved or so they can get Olympics coverage set up for 4 years in the future, etc.
All of Hulus content runs in flash... but they link to content on other sites that uses WMV - which should work on Mac at least if you download the QT plugin (used to be called Flip4Mac)
Here's an interesting thought... create multiple personas. Make them just 1 hop away from a personal account that you use for family, work, close friends, etc. Have each persona do different things and voice different opinions, ie: one is all green and save the earth, the other is all money, power and status.
The idea is that if someone / employer thinks they're being clever by "finding you out" - you can just make a quick post on a forum as the other persona about something only you would know (the interviewer's first name for instance) - then point them over to that... and let them know that these are "personas" online, as in characters you play for entertainment during your leisure time.
Sure this won't work if they happen across your 'bad guy' persona and jump to conclusions before you ever get to an interview - but this is rare as most hiring managers don't have time to profile every candidate - just the ones they are considering.
uhmm you can take a job that sucks without feeling like you have to be loyal to the company you work for. In that scenario i would ask them if I could be hired as a subcontractor rather than employee... pay your own taxes, benefits, etc. but keep your good reputation. If they say they're only hiring full time, just remember that a 7 month gap in your employment records is the same whether you are unemployed or just choose to leave a job off your resume... unless you use your 7 months to do something really interesting on your own that is.
iMacs haven't been limited on number of screens for a while now, if you're talking about extended desktops... not sure what else you'd be referring to (multiple video cards?)
Greed as a motivator isn't good or bad. Most people unfortunately only look at one type of greed... greed for material goods or currency to buy them with. People should be more greedy about things like safety, stability, peace of mind, equality, justice, etc.
The problem is that our society has equated financial success with all of the above - which is funny because it rarely brings any of them and typically brings the opposite. People need to find a greedy balance in their lives.
I am greedy about my quality of life, my family, my home and far off in distance - financial success and status within society. As I get older I'll probably add in community and improving society as a whole... but not until I get the others taken care of, sorry I'm greedy that way.
A company OTOH should have different greed priorities... but employee Quality of life should be high, as should shareholder value and long term prospects. What you've described is that individuals are putting their own greed before that of the company and using company resources to satisfy their own greed. Shareholders should give them the boot.
in general I agree with your post but wanted to extend and abstract it more so others can see how greed applies to all aspects of life. Greed is the big motivator.
Try out ModX CMS... it's like WordPress but with infinite Template Variables which automatically create input fields for your page authoring screen... and can be of any input type (text, textarea, radio group, select list/menu, etc) and can be bound to a data source or hardcoded or dynamic via user input... so sweet.
Wordpress is still more usable but only because you can't make a generated authoring page more usable than a stripped down simple static page like WP uses.
I recommend ModXCMS for medium sized sites which do not need eCommerce integrated or version control... very flexible and powerful but not enterprise ready. Drupal is the way to go if you need super solid advanced capabilities but is overkill for many websites.
I typically combine ModX with cakePHP applications... In ModX it is easy to include an external app into a managed page... and just as easy to include ModX global variables and session data into the external apps.... they can be passed in or can be processed after or you could use a placeholder set in ModX to assign your results to, etc.
As a lot of previous posters have mentioned, 1000+ unique visitors even with each doing heavy traffic is still pretty low. 100,000+ would warrant load balancing... or if you are serving up media of some sort and then I'd recommend a media server to offload that portion of the traffic.
What you can do is performance tune your webserver and database server. BTW if you don't have your DB on a different server, that could be a first step.
So performance tuning... here are a few good articles on the MediaTemple site which deal with Apache and MySQL:
The idea with this is to turn off services you're not using. It mentions specific services known to be running on MTs DV servers... DNS, SpamAssassin, etc. YMMV but the idea is sound.
If you need a variety of services to work, consider running multiple servers dedicated to individual tasks. This will also help when it's time to troubleshoot, upgrade, etc.
I suggest using Virtual Machines for everything, especially since there are available VM Images for just about any base configuration you can think of (regardless of vendor) and it makes backups, swapping out upgrades, etc. very efficient. The process is such: copy existing VM image to a new machine (or new container) upgrade everything, test, test, test, then swap the new image out for the old when you're ready. Voila. If you've used a different machine for your DB for instance, you can upgrade your webserver machine w/ all scripts, etc. with no downtime - and have a backup sitting there seconds away from re-deployment if anything goes wrong.
Just FYi, the site linked to in the article only shows Worldwide stats on it's free overview page. So that 7.42% is a worldwide statistic. Which considering the costs associated with a Mac is pretty impressive.
You have to pay for a subscription to that site to see their US and other breakdown stats.
Does you phone sync your contacts, calendars and email OTA? Does it let you control your Media Center? Does it play 3D games?
Can you take a photo of something and load it into an app where you can annotate it and then email it off?
It's not about old/new technology.. it's about a platform that can be extended with a truly good interface that let's you do things... the iPhone isn't perfect but it is certainly one of the best mobile platforms ever created.
Slashdot Mirror
"Where the technology does have great applications is among Fibre-to-the-Building deployments in commercial areas.
"You might have fibre connected from the DSLAM to the basement of an office building," Goodwin said. "You can then run bonded VDSL2+ up into all the other floors.""
Apparently it's cheaper to roll out fibre to the home these days for new installs and the existing copper to the home is insufficient for last mile where there is fibre to the street (junction)...so looks like it's great for business use or specific regions which fit into some window of installation where they put in redundant copper to the home with fibre to the street.
You'll find that unfortunately your experience so far is not new, nor uncommon... most people don't teach themselves anything, they are more than happy to continue with the lot life gave them, complaining about it the whole time and expecting someone else to step in and improve it.
It's always been that way and will continue for the rest of humanity. Sad but true.
I'm not a college grad but do have to travel several times a year for my job to work with clients on strategy. Domestic and International.... neither of which is very fun... not un-fun exactly, just not fun and I have a fun job.
Skype or GoToMeeting are much more effective 90% of the time, cost 90% less money and everyone is happier when it's something that can be done remotely.
These college grads need to realize that travel is a huge waste of energy and time... something which cuts into their effectiveness and can upset their personal life dramatically. Sure it sounds like fun to go abroad frequently - the reality is that you don't get to pick when, where or for how long... that's not a business trip, it's a vacation. Work travel is mostly early mornings, long meetings and boring plane rides... punctuated by a hangover your second day out (why does everyone feel the need to do shots when they travel?).
SO... save your money and plan a trip using your vacation time. You'll enjoy it even more after the anticipation of having planned it...
It's not 'wrongdoing' at all... it could be taking a stance on the environment or speaking up about how the open source philosophy is so much better for the world... it's that 'morality' is subjective and has nothing to do with running a business.
No, Management could care less whether you are 'up to no good' or trying to save the planet, as long as the end result is legal profit for their bottom line. Whatever your motives are... don't tell them, just show the pretty chart where money starts falling from the sky and into their wallets.
I've never been charged for an SMS on my iPhone plan.
Yes, but at least for now, it's only available for an iPhone - where SMS is not a profit mechanism (at least not in the way other plans had it set up). Additionally other providers are starting to offer unlimited SMS plans in exchange for customer loyalty... so the SMS profit model will be drying up soon anyways.
True but insurance covers this scenario. SO yes, I'd 'waste' my money on insurance - because when they did figure out that I hadn't stolen the vehicle and I got to have my day in court - I'd sue everyone involved and make out like a bandit.
In fact getting insurance in that scenario is the key to a huge pay day.. ie: stickin it to the man. Without insurance I'm just another statistic and a patsy as well (what better "proof" is there that someone is responsible for an accident than their lack of insurance - it's almost like they were "planning" to get into an accident).
Uh, read the article.. it's about a volcanic lake with a weak natural form which allows for CO2 gas to leak from the magma beneath to the lake.
What does that have to do with a hand picked reservoir audited for safe storage of CO2?
We'd have to go out of our way to select such a poor choice as directly beneath a lake... then heat up all the rock around it somehow so as to weaken and make porous the natural barrier, and then not do anything about it until the build up of leaked gas is so great that it has to explode into the atmosphere.
Yes it does sound like a made for TV disaster flick...
Desalination technology has actually advanced to the point where this would be a non-issue with plentiful energy.
The most populace cities of the world are on the coasts. Take the demand pressure away from these cities with desalination and everyone else will have a plentiful supply of natural fresh water.
Religious factions are vying for a scarce resource as well... mind share. Add in the fact that any group once established MUST compete for natural resources and you're back to square one.
If you watched the Parody video for 'surface' you can skip this post...
SO rather than improve upon the interfaces that we have, everybody is looking for something brand new so that all the software and hardware we've already bought and learned how to use effectively can be flushed down the toilet and we can buy all new technology, which is slower, less efficient and requires re-learning everything. Great. Go Humanity.
All I want is a tactile touch surface for my laptop... use that morphing technology from the Intel cellphone article (yes it's several posts in the future)... and make me a touch screen / pad that can change shape subtly so I can have a 'keyboard', a 'notepad' a 'game pad' and a whole lot of slightly different touch interfaces that are customized for the application I'm running.
We don't need new ways to interact, we just need to enhance the existing interactions. As another poster mentioned, we are built to use our hands to manipulate our world, our eyes, ears and other sensory organs observe these manipulations and our brain has specialized libraries for reacting via our hands that we don't even have to think about, once trained they just happen.
So inventors/researchers... stop trying to change the world completely... start trying to make the world better by enhancing what already works. Yes for the last time, I really do need 'a better mousetrap', so start building.
If you need to make something really new, research/invent better materials to work with so someone else can use them to create devices people want.
Have you payed your $100 yet? I think you're missing one step... which is not the 'become a developer' part.. it's the 'become a distributor' part... which is what the articles should say.
Anyone can become a developer without a license etc. etc. but to become a distributor you need Apple's blessing and a contract, which appears to be taking longer and longer to get.
I was very busy at 5 - 8 building Transformers out of anything I could get my hands on. Legos at first, then Matboard, tape, glue, then balsa wood with servos and hobby remotes... I built cars and planes too... and hot air balloons and rubber band powered machines with gears and springs to enhance/distribute the power.
Secure P2P with a friends list... yeah, people will be setting up those pay to play web pages where you have to get a password by signing up for a pron account in no time....
This is a step backwards in my book.
I'm certain that Hulu at least has tried to get international distribution... most likely it is because the organization which holds the rights to that is not interested.... often each country will have a company which has previously negotiated distribution rights for various content. The details of these contracts are likely very convoluted due to some special circumstance.
I can imagine a scenario where a media company gives some other media company distribution rights to general content so that they can get Brittany Spears concerts approved or so they can get Olympics coverage set up for 4 years in the future, etc.
All of Hulus content runs in flash... but they link to content on other sites that uses WMV - which should work on Mac at least if you download the QT plugin (used to be called Flip4Mac)
Here's an interesting thought... create multiple personas. Make them just 1 hop away from a personal account that you use for family, work, close friends, etc. Have each persona do different things and voice different opinions, ie: one is all green and save the earth, the other is all money, power and status.
The idea is that if someone / employer thinks they're being clever by "finding you out" - you can just make a quick post on a forum as the other persona about something only you would know (the interviewer's first name for instance) - then point them over to that... and let them know that these are "personas" online, as in characters you play for entertainment during your leisure time.
Sure this won't work if they happen across your 'bad guy' persona and jump to conclusions before you ever get to an interview - but this is rare as most hiring managers don't have time to profile every candidate - just the ones they are considering.
uhmm you can take a job that sucks without feeling like you have to be loyal to the company you work for. In that scenario i would ask them if I could be hired as a subcontractor rather than employee... pay your own taxes, benefits, etc. but keep your good reputation. If they say they're only hiring full time, just remember that a 7 month gap in your employment records is the same whether you are unemployed or just choose to leave a job off your resume... unless you use your 7 months to do something really interesting on your own that is.
iMacs haven't been limited on number of screens for a while now, if you're talking about extended desktops... not sure what else you'd be referring to (multiple video cards?)
Greed as a motivator isn't good or bad. Most people unfortunately only look at one type of greed... greed for material goods or currency to buy them with. People should be more greedy about things like safety, stability, peace of mind, equality, justice, etc.
The problem is that our society has equated financial success with all of the above - which is funny because it rarely brings any of them and typically brings the opposite. People need to find a greedy balance in their lives.
I am greedy about my quality of life, my family, my home and far off in distance - financial success and status within society. As I get older I'll probably add in community and improving society as a whole... but not until I get the others taken care of, sorry I'm greedy that way.
A company OTOH should have different greed priorities... but employee Quality of life should be high, as should shareholder value and long term prospects. What you've described is that individuals are putting their own greed before that of the company and using company resources to satisfy their own greed. Shareholders should give them the boot.
in general I agree with your post but wanted to extend and abstract it more so others can see how greed applies to all aspects of life. Greed is the big motivator.
Try out ModX CMS... it's like WordPress but with infinite Template Variables which automatically create input fields for your page authoring screen... and can be of any input type (text, textarea, radio group, select list/menu, etc) and can be bound to a data source or hardcoded or dynamic via user input... so sweet.
Wordpress is still more usable but only because you can't make a generated authoring page more usable than a stripped down simple static page like WP uses.
I recommend ModXCMS for medium sized sites which do not need eCommerce integrated or version control... very flexible and powerful but not enterprise ready. Drupal is the way to go if you need super solid advanced capabilities but is overkill for many websites.
I typically combine ModX with cakePHP applications... In ModX it is easy to include an external app into a managed page... and just as easy to include ModX global variables and session data into the external apps.... they can be passed in or can be processed after or you could use a placeholder set in ModX to assign your results to, etc.
As a lot of previous posters have mentioned, 1000+ unique visitors even with each doing heavy traffic is still pretty low. 100,000+ would warrant load balancing... or if you are serving up media of some sort and then I'd recommend a media server to offload that portion of the traffic.
What you can do is performance tune your webserver and database server. BTW if you don't have your DB on a different server, that could be a first step.
So performance tuning... here are a few good articles on the MediaTemple site which deal with Apache and MySQL:
http://kb.mediatemple.net/questions/246/(dv)+HOWTO:+Basic+Apache+performance+tuning+(httpd)
http://kb.mediatemple.net/questions/258/(dv)+HOWTO%3A+Basic+MySQL+performance+tuning+(MySQLd)
Yes these are written for their customers but they apply to any server running Apache and/or MySQL.
This next article I'm posting as an example only:
http://kb.mediatemple.net/questions/770/(dv)+HOWTO%3A+Misc.+performance+tuning
The idea with this is to turn off services you're not using. It mentions specific services known to be running on MTs DV servers... DNS, SpamAssassin, etc. YMMV but the idea is sound.
If you need a variety of services to work, consider running multiple servers dedicated to individual tasks. This will also help when it's time to troubleshoot, upgrade, etc.
I suggest using Virtual Machines for everything, especially since there are available VM Images for just about any base configuration you can think of (regardless of vendor) and it makes backups, swapping out upgrades, etc. very efficient. The process is such: copy existing VM image to a new machine (or new container) upgrade everything, test, test, test, then swap the new image out for the old when you're ready. Voila. If you've used a different machine for your DB for instance, you can upgrade your webserver machine w/ all scripts, etc. with no downtime - and have a backup sitting there seconds away from re-deployment if anything goes wrong.
Just FYi, the site linked to in the article only shows Worldwide stats on it's free overview page. So that 7.42% is a worldwide statistic. Which considering the costs associated with a Mac is pretty impressive.
You have to pay for a subscription to that site to see their US and other breakdown stats.
Does you phone sync your contacts, calendars and email OTA? Does it let you control your Media Center? Does it play 3D games?
Can you take a photo of something and load it into an app where you can annotate it and then email it off?
It's not about old/new technology.. it's about a platform that can be extended with a truly good interface that let's you do things... the iPhone isn't perfect but it is certainly one of the best mobile platforms ever created.