I don't think IBM care, they are simply paying for the exposure. Regardless of what happens, IBM gets a headline for developing something that is perceived to be leading edge technology. Even if Kasparov wins, IBM doesn't lose.
This game sounds too much like the classic board game "Diplomacy". I am not surprised that they couldn't capture the magic of Diplomacy in a MMORPG. The whole point of the game Diplomacy is to be a complete bastard to your friends, and win through underhanded tactics, deceipt, treachery and eavesdropping. It's not the sort of game that I would care to play with a bunch of strangers, I don't really see the point in it.
This is a tech discussion, it's not uncommon to find people paying more attention to what they are saying than to how they say it. I hope your petty trolling effort gave your ego a much needed boost. Did calling me stupid make you feel smarter? I hope so for your sake.
One thing the article hasn't been updated to mention is that Intel have changed the Itanium roadmap. They will be introducing a dual core processor in 2005 (Montecito), this is no longer a rumour. Intel are playing catchup here, IBM and Sun are already much further along this path. Intel do however have the resources to throw into development to do this successfully, the gains they have made from Itanium-1 to Itanium-2 suggests that catching up is not beyond them.
I wonder how much of the battle for domination in the server market will be decided by economics rather than technology. I suspect that if Intel can kill off AMD (how long can AMD sustain their current losses?) then they could use their dominance in the desktop market to subsidise the development of Itanium and really drive it into the server market, killing off the strugglers like Sun by seriously undercutting them with price/performance. In the long term I think only IBM stands in Intel's way.
I drink a lot of water while I sit at my computer at work. It's good for you, and it means you have to get up and go to the bathroom a lot, which is a good thing.
Many jobs are now being outsourced overseas to places like India and Singapore. I expect that in 10 years time jobs like the one I now hold will be few and far between, I am a systems admin working for a large outsourcing organisation. Reality is that many positions don't need to be filled locally, if you have an adequately skilled person that speeks the language it doesn't really matter where they are located. If someone that has the same skills as me that lives in Bangalore can do the job, and for half my salary, what future do I have?. It is a matter of time before large outsourcing organisations such as the one I work for start setting up offices in India etc with the intent of winning outsourcing contracts by undercutting the companies that try and do the same thing locally.
A senior manager in my dept recently sat us down in a big meeting to discuss P&L figures, our local dept is not doing well. Among all the talk of things we can do to turn it around he did mention that he and a few senior colleagues are flying to India next month to see if there are any opportunities to be had employing foregin labour. This is the thin end of the wedge, my days are numbered. I am already planning for a career outside of IT, I am just praying I can cling to my job for the 3-5 years I need to set myself up financially before I am made redundant.
Having a ratings system for computer games could be a good thing. This will make it real easy to see exactly how much gratuitous violence and nudity I can get for my gaming dollar.
Lots of companies like the idea of Star Office because they want to break away from Micro$oft, but they are afraid of free software. They are much happier with paying a nominal amount to Sun for the warm fuzzy feeling of having a company officially support the product. It's all about ensuring you have a throat to choke if something goes wrong IMO.
There is absolutely no way HP will try and take on Intel or anyone else in the market for low-end single processor systems. For starters the Alpha costs a lot because it has been made with scalability in mind, it cant compete on price with an Intel chip. The size of Intel and the volumes of chips they produce means HP could not compete (seen AMD's P&L figures lately?). Micro$oft also pulled the plug on alpha support years ago, and windoze still drives the low end single processor market (despite all the hype surrounding Linux).
Compaq were too scared of Intel to even remain in the high end market, where Intel are yet to make an impact. The competition is going to be fierce, it will be interesting to see if Sun and IBM can compete in the long term. Sun are already starting to look shaky, but at least they were willing to stay and fight. I think Intel will eventually push it's competitors out of the processor market, except maybe for a few niche products. The market is IMO a natural monopoly just waiting for one company to step up to the plate. The fact that Alpha is being killed just proves the point that superior technology counts for little.
Alpha is dead, this is the last hurah in what was a very significant era. Great technology developed by brilliant technicians and killed off by incompetent managers.
The installed base of OpenVMS on Alpha is still huge, it's just that Compaq/HP are not making an effort to sell it anymore. Both companies have been focusing more on Linux/Unix/Windoze. VMS is also being ported to Itanium, the first boot of VMS on Itanium is expected in the next month or so.
Skinner: Gasp! Star Wars action figures, still in their original wrapping. Look, it's Luke, and Obi-Wan, and my favourite the Wookie Chewbacca.
Ralph: What's a Wookie?
Skinner: What do you think?
Miss Hoover: I think it's lunchtime
Skinner: We have a winner!!!
I can't believe they make out Gimli to be a fool. That is just terrible. Gimli is a proud and powerful Dwarf, he should not have been portraid any other way. Again Faramir is a wise and noble man, I will be disappointed if he does not appear so when I see the film. I think it is tolerable for Jackson to change the odd scene here and there, but to deliberately change the characters persona is a real mistake. If he wants to make up his own story and develop his own characters then he should do so, and not butcher Tolkiens works.
My comments are obviously based only on what I have read, since I haven't seen the film, but I don't like the sounds of this:(
I'm not big into spelling characters names, so if I've misspelled Ghimli or Aragorn or WhoFrigginGivesACrap, please forgive me for not rushing home to open the books and get every letter in the right spot
Why would I bother reading a review by someone that spells Gimli's name Ghimli?. I guess it's ok for someone that isn't a Tolkien fan to review the film so that the unwashed masses of Tolkien ignorami can get an unbiased opinion. But ffs this is/.... as far as I am concerned you don't qualify to express your opinion on the subject, let alone post a review here. I bet you don't regularly quote Monty Python either!. Outrageous.
You are right on the money with most of what you are saying. Most Sys Admins never document anything, and they think that being the only person that can do x, y, z gives them job security. Nobody is irreplacable though, no matter how much you know.
Share your information! Document your password. Give copies to your boss
I am a Sys Admin myself, I'm not convinced that documenting and giving out my account password is a good idea though. Why would I want to do that?. As you rightly suggested, no competent Sys Admin uses their personal account for anything other than interactive system management. Nobody else would ever need access to my account.
You are reading things into my comment without basis. What I was alluding to is that an education system that packs kids into large classes which are paced to allow for the slowest children is a bad thing.
I am actually an Australian, we have IMO a much more egalitarian approach than the US. Education and Health is all very well provided for by the government. We also have a steeply progressive tax system and we lose a LOT of proffessional people oversease because they can get a better lifestyle in a country that doesn't force them to provide for those that are less well off. This can stiffle industry and innovation.
I think AOL is not fighting spam out of any great sense of decency. More likely the issue AOL has is that these spammers are using their network to generate revenue, and that AON are not getting this slice of the pie. If too many freelance spammers are allowed to roam free then AOL will not be able to spam its customers effectively. This is an issue of ownership, not morality.
A poor standard of education is just one of the pitfalls of trying to create an egalitarian society. If you always try and create a safety net for the weak, lazy and stupid then you limit your ability to embrace the potential of the brilliant and industrious. This will obviously stiffle innovation, and less socially responsible countries will have an advantage.
Why should a CEO be paid in the millions for what he does
Because talented "C level" management is short in supply and in great demand. I think the talented CEO's should be paid a lot more than most of the actors and musicians that make millions. Even a poorly performing company might not reflect badly on the CEO. Perhaps the organisation is restructuring for long term goals, or their market is performing very badly and profits are unachievable. Sometimes a CEO that can help a company weather the storm is very important.
What would be good is to see bad CEO's foiled in their attempts to loot companies when they bail out. Perhaps CEO's should have their performance independantly reviewed before they can award themselves significant bonuses.
Freedom to do all kinds of things in the world in which you are situated is what makes a great RPG. I don't like being led by the nose through some storyline where deviation from the plot means that you can't do anything worthwhile. That's why a good GM/DM managing the roleplay on the fly is better than any pre-written adventure or module, and it's why MMORPG's are more fun than games like Baldur's Gate.
The article doesn't say exactly, but I got the impression that we are not talking about a flat rate tax to account for disposal. More like the company takes control of the disposal themselves. The article mentions that HP already do this for some companies and charge $30.
I suspect the reasoning behind HP's move is that the markets that they are primarily interested in are more favourable to this kind of policy than your average white-box company. For example, HP could take advantage of the economies of scale in a situation where they are taking control of disposal when one of their customers upgrades 1000 PC's. Whereas the costs for taking control of the disposal of an individual PC by a whitebox manufacturer would be higher. HP would also have better deals with whatever recycling factility they choose to deal with.
The bottom line here is that this would be an advantage for the HP's, IBM's and DELL's of the world. So the big companies would be more able to compete on price in the consumer market.
I totally agree. The X systems per admin mentaility is what stupid managers use to work out resource requirements. It depends not just on the OS and the hardware but more what it is used for. How many users rely on the applications that run on it, and how dynamic is the environment. There is a reason some systems cost $5,000 while others cost millions, why would they cost the same to manage?.
Intel will scramble to introduce a new chip Yamhill
Rumour has it that Intel's development of the rumoured Yamhill chip was abandoned because it couldn't match the performance of Opteron. I would take this with a grain of salt though, since neither chip exists in the wild, and only one officially exists even as vaporware. But hey it might be true..
Instead of trying to save our species, why not try and make sure that other species remember us. Let's use all our technology and make some gizmo and shoot it off into space. The plan is that one day some species will come along in a space ship and our gizmo will take over the mind of one of the life forms and make them think they are one of us. This life form will live a complete life as if they were one of us in the space of about 20 actual minutes. That way they will understand us and the way we lived, which is much better than saving ourselves!.
Ok, it's a stupid idea, but it was a bloody good Next Gen episode!.
Slashdot Mirror
Did this give a black eye to IBM?
I don't think IBM care, they are simply paying for the exposure. Regardless of what happens, IBM gets a headline for developing something that is perceived to be leading edge technology. Even if Kasparov wins, IBM doesn't lose.
This game sounds too much like the classic board game "Diplomacy". I am not surprised that they couldn't capture the magic of Diplomacy in a MMORPG. The whole point of the game Diplomacy is to be a complete bastard to your friends, and win through underhanded tactics, deceipt, treachery and eavesdropping. It's not the sort of game that I would care to play with a bunch of strangers, I don't really see the point in it.
This is a tech discussion, it's not uncommon to find people paying more attention to what they are saying than to how they say it. I hope your petty trolling effort gave your ego a much needed boost. Did calling me stupid make you feel smarter? I hope so for your sake.
One thing the article hasn't been updated to mention is that Intel have changed the Itanium roadmap. They will be introducing a dual core processor in 2005 (Montecito), this is no longer a rumour. Intel are playing catchup here, IBM and Sun are already much further along this path. Intel do however have the resources to throw into development to do this successfully, the gains they have made from Itanium-1 to Itanium-2 suggests that catching up is not beyond them.
I wonder how much of the battle for domination in the server market will be decided by economics rather than technology. I suspect that if Intel can kill off AMD (how long can AMD sustain their current losses?) then they could use their dominance in the desktop market to subsidise the development of Itanium and really drive it into the server market, killing off the strugglers like Sun by seriously undercutting them with price/performance. In the long term I think only IBM stands in Intel's way.
I drink a lot of water while I sit at my computer at work. It's good for you, and it means you have to get up and go to the bathroom a lot, which is a good thing.
Many jobs are now being outsourced overseas to places like India and Singapore. I expect that in 10 years time jobs like the one I now hold will be few and far between, I am a systems admin working for a large outsourcing organisation. Reality is that many positions don't need to be filled locally, if you have an adequately skilled person that speeks the language it doesn't really matter where they are located. If someone that has the same skills as me that lives in Bangalore can do the job, and for half my salary, what future do I have?. It is a matter of time before large outsourcing organisations such as the one I work for start setting up offices in India etc with the intent of winning outsourcing contracts by undercutting the companies that try and do the same thing locally.
A senior manager in my dept recently sat us down in a big meeting to discuss P&L figures, our local dept is not doing well. Among all the talk of things we can do to turn it around he did mention that he and a few senior colleagues are flying to India next month to see if there are any opportunities to be had employing foregin labour. This is the thin end of the wedge, my days are numbered. I am already planning for a career outside of IT, I am just praying I can cling to my job for the 3-5 years I need to set myself up financially before I am made redundant.
Having a ratings system for computer games could be a good thing. This will make it real easy to see exactly how much gratuitous violence and nudity I can get for my gaming dollar.
Lots of companies like the idea of Star Office because they want to break away from Micro$oft, but they are afraid of free software. They are much happier with paying a nominal amount to Sun for the warm fuzzy feeling of having a company officially support the product. It's all about ensuring you have a throat to choke if something goes wrong IMO.
There is absolutely no way HP will try and take on Intel or anyone else in the market for low-end single processor systems. For starters the Alpha costs a lot because it has been made with scalability in mind, it cant compete on price with an Intel chip. The size of Intel and the volumes of chips they produce means HP could not compete (seen AMD's P&L figures lately?). Micro$oft also pulled the plug on alpha support years ago, and windoze still drives the low end single processor market (despite all the hype surrounding Linux).
Compaq were too scared of Intel to even remain in the high end market, where Intel are yet to make an impact. The competition is going to be fierce, it will be interesting to see if Sun and IBM can compete in the long term. Sun are already starting to look shaky, but at least they were willing to stay and fight. I think Intel will eventually push it's competitors out of the processor market, except maybe for a few niche products. The market is IMO a natural monopoly just waiting for one company to step up to the plate. The fact that Alpha is being killed just proves the point that superior technology counts for little.
Alpha is dead, this is the last hurah in what was a very significant era. Great technology developed by brilliant technicians and killed off by incompetent managers.
I imagine that only a tiny fraction of the movies shared are made by Warner Bros anyway, after all they don't actually produce pr0n do they? :p
The installed base of OpenVMS on Alpha is still huge, it's just that Compaq/HP are not making an effort to sell it anymore. Both companies have been focusing more on Linux/Unix/Windoze. VMS is also being ported to Itanium, the first boot of VMS on Itanium is expected in the next month or so.
Skinner: Gasp! Star Wars action figures, still in their original wrapping. Look, it's Luke, and Obi-Wan, and my favourite the Wookie Chewbacca.
Ralph: What's a Wookie?
Skinner: What do you think?
Miss Hoover: I think it's lunchtime
Skinner: We have a winner!!!
I can't believe they make out Gimli to be a fool. That is just terrible. Gimli is a proud and powerful Dwarf, he should not have been portraid any other way. Again Faramir is a wise and noble man, I will be disappointed if he does not appear so when I see the film. I think it is tolerable for Jackson to change the odd scene here and there, but to deliberately change the characters persona is a real mistake. If he wants to make up his own story and develop his own characters then he should do so, and not butcher Tolkiens works.
:(
My comments are obviously based only on what I have read, since I haven't seen the film, but I don't like the sounds of this
I'm not big into spelling characters names, so if I've misspelled Ghimli or Aragorn or WhoFrigginGivesACrap, please forgive me for not rushing home to open the books and get every letter in the right spot
/. ... as far as I am concerned you don't qualify to express your opinion on the subject, let alone post a review here. I bet you don't regularly quote Monty Python either!. Outrageous.
Why would I bother reading a review by someone that spells Gimli's name Ghimli?. I guess it's ok for someone that isn't a Tolkien fan to review the film so that the unwashed masses of Tolkien ignorami can get an unbiased opinion. But ffs this is
You know, that cool symbol thingy with his initials all intermingled. I reckon that's good enough.
You are right on the money with most of what you are saying. Most Sys Admins never document anything, and they think that being the only person that can do x, y, z gives them job security. Nobody is irreplacable though, no matter how much you know.
Share your information! Document your password. Give copies to your boss
I am a Sys Admin myself, I'm not convinced that documenting and giving out my account password is a good idea though. Why would I want to do that?. As you rightly suggested, no competent Sys Admin uses their personal account for anything other than interactive system management. Nobody else would ever need access to my account.
You are reading things into my comment without basis. What I was alluding to is that an education system that packs kids into large classes which are paced to allow for the slowest children is a bad thing.
I am actually an Australian, we have IMO a much more egalitarian approach than the US. Education and Health is all very well provided for by the government. We also have a steeply progressive tax system and we lose a LOT of proffessional people oversease because they can get a better lifestyle in a country that doesn't force them to provide for those that are less well off. This can stiffle industry and innovation.
I think AOL is not fighting spam out of any great sense of decency. More likely the issue AOL has is that these spammers are using their network to generate revenue, and that AON are not getting this slice of the pie. If too many freelance spammers are allowed to roam free then AOL will not be able to spam its customers effectively. This is an issue of ownership, not morality.
A poor standard of education is just one of the pitfalls of trying to create an egalitarian society. If you always try and create a safety net for the weak, lazy and stupid then you limit your ability to embrace the potential of the brilliant and industrious. This will obviously stiffle innovation, and less socially responsible countries will have an advantage.
Why should a CEO be paid in the millions for what he does
Because talented "C level" management is short in supply and in great demand. I think the talented CEO's should be paid a lot more than most of the actors and musicians that make millions. Even a poorly performing company might not reflect badly on the CEO. Perhaps the organisation is restructuring for long term goals, or their market is performing very badly and profits are unachievable. Sometimes a CEO that can help a company weather the storm is very important.
What would be good is to see bad CEO's foiled in their attempts to loot companies when they bail out. Perhaps CEO's should have their performance independantly reviewed before they can award themselves significant bonuses.
Freedom to do all kinds of things in the world in which you are situated is what makes a great RPG. I don't like being led by the nose through some storyline where deviation from the plot means that you can't do anything worthwhile. That's why a good GM/DM managing the roleplay on the fly is better than any pre-written adventure or module, and it's why MMORPG's are more fun than games like Baldur's Gate.
The article doesn't say exactly, but I got the impression that we are not talking about a flat rate tax to account for disposal. More like the company takes control of the disposal themselves. The article mentions that HP already do this for some companies and charge $30.
I suspect the reasoning behind HP's move is that the markets that they are primarily interested in are more favourable to this kind of policy than your average white-box company. For example, HP could take advantage of the economies of scale in a situation where they are taking control of disposal when one of their customers upgrades 1000 PC's. Whereas the costs for taking control of the disposal of an individual PC by a whitebox manufacturer would be higher. HP would also have better deals with whatever recycling factility they choose to deal with.
The bottom line here is that this would be an advantage for the HP's, IBM's and DELL's of the world. So the big companies would be more able to compete on price in the consumer market.
I totally agree. The X systems per admin mentaility is what stupid managers use to work out resource requirements. It depends not just on the OS and the hardware but more what it is used for. How many users rely on the applications that run on it, and how dynamic is the environment. There is a reason some systems cost $5,000 while others cost millions, why would they cost the same to manage?.
Intel will scramble to introduce a new chip Yamhill
Rumour has it that Intel's development of the rumoured Yamhill chip was abandoned because it couldn't match the performance of Opteron. I would take this with a grain of salt though, since neither chip exists in the wild, and only one officially exists even as vaporware. But hey it might be true..
Instead of trying to save our species, why not try and make sure that other species remember us. Let's use all our technology and make some gizmo and shoot it off into space. The plan is that one day some species will come along in a space ship and our gizmo will take over the mind of one of the life forms and make them think they are one of us. This life form will live a complete life as if they were one of us in the space of about 20 actual minutes. That way they will understand us and the way we lived, which is much better than saving ourselves!.
Ok, it's a stupid idea, but it was a bloody good Next Gen episode!.