"While it's very difficult to benchmark the impact of SuperFetch well, in our usage of Vista if you have enough memory it is a tremendous ally. Honestly SuperFetch is the biggest reason, in our opinion, to move to the x64 version of Vista so you can use even more memory. Although we found that 2GB of memory is still quite passable under Vista, the new sweet spot if you happen to multitask a lot is 4GB - in no small part due to how well SuperFetch utilizes the additional memory. Do keep in mind that you'll need to make sure your motherboard has proper BIOS support for 4GB and also make sure Vista x64 has driver support for all of your peripherals before committing to the move....
How much RAM do you really need for Windows Vista? We recommend a bare minimum of 1GB of memory for all Vista users, 2GB if you're a power user but don't have a lot running at the same time, and 4GB if you hate the sound of swapping to disk...."
Windows Vista clearly is not a great new performer when it comes to executing single applications at maximum speed. Although we only looked at the 32-bit version of Windows Vista Enterprise, we do not expect the 64-bit edition to be faster (at least not with 32-bit applications).
Overall, applications performed as expected, or executed slightly slower than under Windows XP. The synthetic benchmarks such as Everest, PCMark05 or Sandra 2007 show that differences are non-existent on a component level. We also found some programs that refused to work, and others that seem to cause problems at first but eventually ran properly. In any case, we recommend watching for Vista-related software upgrades from your software vendors.
There are some programs that showed deeply disappointing performance. Unreal Tournament 2004 and the professional graphics benchmarking suite SPECviewperf 9.03 suffered heavily from the lack of support for the OpenGL graphics library under Windows Vista. This is something we expected, and we clearly advise against replacing Windows XP with Windows Vista if you need to run professional graphics applications. Both ATI and Nvidia will offer OpenGL support in upcoming driver releases, but it remains to be seen if and how other graphics vendors or Microsoft may offer it.
We are disappointed that CPU-intensive applications such as video transcoding with XviD (DVD to XviD MPEG4) or the MainConcept H.264 Encoder performed 18% to nearly 24% slower in our standard benchmark scenarios. Both benchmarks finished much quicker under Windows XP. There aren't newer versions available, and we don't see immediate solutions to this issue.
There is good news as well: we did not find evidence that Windows Vista's new and fancy AeroGlass interface consumes more energy than Windows XP's 2D desktop. Although our measurements indicate a 1 W increase in power draw at the plug, this is too little of a difference to draw any conclusions. Obviously, the requirements for displaying all elements in 3D, rotating and moving them aren't enough to heat up graphics processors. This might also be a result of Windows Vista's more advanced implementation of ACPI 2.0 (and parts of 3.0), which allows the control of power of system components separately.
Our hopes that Vista might be able to speed up applications are gone. First tests with 64-bit editions result in numbers similar to our 32
You're right about site licenses - but I deal with small businesses who don't use site licenses because they buy machines individually as they need them.
2GB of RAM is $80-100 - multiply that by every machine in the company - and that's assuming the motherboards are set for a maximum of 4GB of RAM and can take 1-2GB sticks...
Do you have any idea how many small businesses - not big corporations that routinely swap out machines every three years because they've amortized them out - are running on four, five, six, seven year old machines that are perfectly fine for office workers with XP? Or that almost all office machines not used for video editing are probably running with 512MB of RAM - which is more than adequate for ninety percent of office workers?
Yes, the hardware requirements for Vista are a problem. Every single industry report has said that. Some people have said that the "sweet spot" for Vista performance is FOUR gigs of RAM. Numerous people have complained that it is dog slow on recent machines with 1-2GB of RAM, depending on applications mix, even a minimal applications mix.
Your experience is essentially irrelevant - a single data point at odds with most others reported for months now.
"If one of your machines dies, you can use its license on the next machine"
Not if it's a Dell - those licenses are tied to the motherboard. Motherboard dies, Dell tells you buy a new copy of XP. One very good reason - along with "Recovery Partitions" and "Recovery CDs" and crapware - never to buy a Dell.
I'm telling my clients who don't have full-fledged install CDs for XP to make sure they get them before the end of the year if they expect to keep using their XP machines past this year. None of this "recovery partition" shit which is useless if your hard drive dies. And "recovery CDs" only work on the same machines and are useless for stuff like System File Check.
The IT industry is presently in a state of full-fledged FRAUD as far as supporting businesses goes: they provide inadequate support for failing machines, they load crapware on the new machines that screws the machines when you remove it (McAfee or Norton frequently do not uninstall properly), and Microsoft is basically forcing wholesale hardware upgrades for essentially little or no benefit other than Bill Gates personal wealth.
It may take another ten years, but sooner or later corporations are going to get seriously sick of this nonsense - and the backlash will put quite a few large IT companies out of business abd provide a major boost to OSS.
Microsoft has now ADMITTED that the National Security Agency had two sets of teams - "red" to determine how to break in, and "blue" to "assist" in designing Vista security - working on Vista.
This means, of course, to anyone with a brain, that the NSA figured out X ways to break into Vista - and told Microsoft about X - n of them (pick your numbers, the idea is the same.)
This means that any government or foreign corporation who uses Vista has just handed the farm to the NSA.
Anybody outside of the US - and any moron inside the US - who uses Vista has to have their head examined.
Oh, sure, the NSA doesn't care about me, or you, so they aren't probing our boxes - right?
Right.
This is way worse than the old story about the hidden "NSA keys" - at least that time Microsoft didn't admit that the NSA had actively been invited to break Windows security (although I wouldn't be surprised if they had been and did.)
People who compare this to SELinux simply don't know what they're talking about. There's no comparison whatsoever, as SELinux is open source.
Mainframes ARE dead - for ninety nine percent of the world's corporations. Who cares if a handful of morons have specific requirements for large processors with large I/O bandwidths?
Everybody likes to claim Windows outsells Linux by looking at the revenue figures rather than the units figures.
How about how much money mainframes bring in vs the rest of the hardware industry?
A recent study said the primary reason for moving from non-mainframe architectures to mainframes was: "improved workload management, performance, availability, and security coupled with reduced costs for electrical power, cooling, floor space, and support staffs."
Which of course only applies to the data center, not to anything else in the IT world.
Here's an example of what more advanced people are doing:
Linux grid takes out firm's aging mainframe By Jack Loftus, News Writer 04 Jan 2007 | SearchOpenSource.com
R.L. Polk & Co., one of the oldest providers of automotive information in the U.S., had a mainframe problem.
In December, IBM touted a 100% increase in the number of ISV applications available for its mainframe offering, System z. More than 390 IBM business partners now offer nearly 1,000 applications for System z customers running Linux, IBM said.
Analyst firm Ptak Noel & Associates also identified the trend in a report released this month, but conceded it was unable to get IBM to disclose if growth was due to internal development on mainframe, or actual production use. Overall, mainframes grew from 2% to 7% on the year, a Ptak report said.
In addition, IBM business partners reported increased customer interest in new IBM technology including the z9 Integrated Information Processor (zIIP) and z Application Assistant Processor (zAAP) specialty engines. More than 60% of IBM mainframe revenue is now driven by new workloads, with approximately 20% of revenue and 30% of MIPS (million instructions per second) coming from Linux customers.
"The story of IBM's mainframe experience is still being written and it looks to be a story of impressive rebirth, renewal and return," the Ptak report said.
Apparently RLP Technologies didn't get the memo.
The mainframe -- an IBM 2066-002, part of the zSeries line -- was unable to keep up with the demands of crunching data on 500 million unique vehicles every year. Some of the data processing jobs on the mainframe would often take several days to complete. Parts of the infrastructure at Polk were close to 20 years old when executives first started looking elsewhere for solutions in 2004.
With about 4.5 petabytes of stored information on hand, the mainframe took on the persona of a lumbering behemoth. This was especially the case when the IT staff had to accommodate new business requirements such as a car dealership adding a new type of vehicle to its inventory. Each update required a major rework of the program, said Mick Isiminger, director of IT operations at RLP Technologies, a wholly-owned research and development subsidiary of Polk.
And the amount of information on hand was growing. As one of the largest providers of automotive consumer information, Polk tasked RLP Technologies (RLPT) with finding, configuring and deploying a higher performance and more flexible alternative.
Grid computing versus mainframe
Leading the effort, Isiminger said the decision was made early on to switch out the mainframe and go with a grid computing environment. Why a grid? Because it offered a "loosely coupled environment" that could adapt to change more easily than a mainframe, he said.
Grid computing performs higher throughput computing by distributing processes across a group of servers. Grids use the resources of this network to solve large-scale computations.
They can also perform computations on large data sets by breaking them into many smaller ones. Grids are a popular form of computing in academic and scientific environments, and organizations like the Open Grid Forum have f
"selective and perhaps discriminatory enforcement by police."
Laws are made to create crime, so the state can selectively and in a discriminatory manner harass its citizens. That is the PURPOSE of law - to allow one class of people to brand another class as "criminals". It has nothing to do with "protecting and serving".
The only good police are dead police. Ditto politicians.
Five minutes later, some Taiwan or mainland Chinese company will be formed to make printers without it.
Five years later, the entire inkjet printer industry will be out of business.
Not to mention that the cost of laser printers is coming down enough that soon the inkjet printer will be off the market anyway. Color lasers are going for $600 now. If the inkjet people start charging $50/cartridge, the laser printers will drop to $200-300, and anybody with a brain will see that inkjets are worthless.
The managers of ALL companies in ALL industries just don't get it. You cannot FORCE people to pay for your product. You have to provide a REASON to buy your crap.
Here's your fundamental flaw in so-called "capitalism". Your managers depend on the very people who are stockholders in their companies - and then proceed to screw those people both as consumers and as stockholders by ripping them off in the marketplace and then cooking the books so the company goes under.
The only reason it works is because the morons who are stockholders think that if they have a crooked management who rips off their customers that the company will make more profit and they will get higher shareholder value. They forget that the same assholes who are ripping off the consumer are ripping THEM off!
Morons.
When are you morons going to realize that management are nothing more than alpha primates who are born with the intent of fucking you over? They can't do anything else - it's in their monkey genes.
Dreamhost offers 200GB of Web space (well, 148GB now, they drop it a bit every little while - but it can go up to nearly 400GB), AND offers a file storage plan where you pay, IIRC, $2.50 per gig ONE TIME for them to host the file FOREVER (or until they go out of business, whichever comes first.)
Anybody who would put their name to a typically stupid Microsoft phrase like "Where do you want to go today?" (to hell, if you use any Microsoft product!) or "people-ready business" (businesses run by chimpanzees, which certainly fits Microsoft!) is not only a shill but a moron.
ALL programs are poorly commented and documented, because nobody teaches the morons in this industry to do their job properly.
I've NEVER seen a decently commented program other than ones I've written. NEVER - in thirty years of being in the business. I've seen a FEW with SOME comments that were useful. But properly commented - oh, hell, no.
Obviously a Microsoft shill from day one. It was obvious then - it's obvious now.
In twelve hours, there will be twenty security experts ripping holes in this moron's so-called "analysis."
Vista is not secure - NOTHING made by Microsoft is secure. Period. End of story. They could work from now to the end of this century, employ nanotechnology and advanced artificial intelligence - and their crap would STILL be unreliable, insecure, and complicated to use. It's a matter of corporate culture and attitude, not security knowledge or technology. Bill Gates simply does not give a shit about ANYTHING but sucking money out of his customers wallets at any cost to those customers well-being, corporate or home, it doesn't matter.
And I thought I was weird. All I did was rob two banks, did some time and overeat burgers and Hagen Daaz.
I don't think I've ever had any friends who carved things into their arms (not that there's anything wrong with B&D, or other fetish behavior - except the juvenility of it all, of course.)
Humans are seriously fucked up.
This story is an example of how you seriously need to check out who you associate with. Other people will get you in prison as fast as you can do it on your own.
that says I'm posting too fast to the discussion - WHEN THE DISCUSSION IS HOURS OLD AND NOBODY ELSE IS POSTING - I don't give a shit what you've changed.
Buy another server if you can't handle the load. morons.
I mean, really, it's friggin' obvious. Every one of these wireless companies throws out a new router every month, then spends the next six to 12 months uploading firmware fixes for that model to their Web sites because of the bugs. It's obvious that the whole thing is being driven by marketing, not the actual technology.
They simply can't make the stuff work reliably with their OWN hardware, let alone connecting to anybody else's hardware.
And when you add in the flaky wireless software drivers and management software - good luck with that.
If you're going to use wireless in a business, put one wireless AP for every one or two users at most. And don't even bother if those users need to run Microsoft Access databases over the network, because it won't work. Make sure all the servers are wired, the main Internet access is wired, and the only thing the wireless APs do is connect one or two users per AP to a wired connection to the rest of the network. That way, you avoid stringing wire all over the office, but you still have solid wired connections where it matters. How you can set that up for any significant number of people is beyond me, however. This sort of solution would only work with maybe 25 users. Maybe you could do it on a floor by floor basis and sill run wire between floors only.
Even then, if you don't own your own building, and/or have office buildings around you with wireless using tenants, you're going to have interference problems unless you spend the big bucks for high-powered Cisco gear that can swamp the other guys lower cost stuff power output.
When wireless works - in a home with no interference problems - or in an Internet cafe - it's great. When it doesn't, it's a nightmare to fix.
It's not a technology to base a business on. It's just too complicated and it just isn't reliable enough.
Well, get used to it, because it's beginning to sound like the wave of the future.
Some Internet cafes and other outfits providing "free" wireless access are doing it because of ad revenue they get by serving ads. The ads appear like a banner on top of your Web browser. It does NOT insert into your content but rides on top of it in the Web browser in a frame. The ads are inserted by a server that is sent the browser request via the wireless router running OpenWRT or similar products. The browser request is rerouted by the router to the server which retrieves the original request, inserts the ad and returns the combination to the browser.
You get free Net access, the provider gets a piece of the ad revenue and a free router to advertise free Net access to attract customers to his business, the server provider gets revenue, and the advertiser gets local targeted ads based on the location and nature of the wireless access provider to potential local customers (or national if that's the advertiser.)
There are a number of companies doing this now, and I expect it to take off. Ad-supported media has a long history in this country.
The one time somebody uses the term "cracker" vs "hacker" correctly (supposedly) and everybody at/. doesn't understand it.
You can't make this stuff up, folks.
And here we find out Gates "doesn't do email." I thought Andrea Corr was technologically illiterate when she admitted only learning how to do email in fall of 2005 (sister Caroline told her, "Don't tell people that!").
But here we have more evidence of the nature of managers - reflecting the joke from the publishing world many years ago. A publisher and his editor entered an elevator. The editor was carrying an armload of bags and manuscripts. The publisher wasn't. The publisher pointed to the editor: "You, editor. Me, publisher."
Flunkies do email and bring the results to the people with the real power.
I would have expected Stross to be a bit more imaginative, given some of his stories emphasizing Transhuman societies such as Accelerando. However, lack of imagination is just as prevalent among sci-fi writers as it is in the general population. I've seen enough stupid sci-fi writer essays to be assured of that.
Humans per se aren't going anywhere. Within this century, the human body and brain will be made obsolete. Transhumans will have the intelligence to solve technological problems unimagined by humans. But even if interstellar movement remains non-feasible, Transhumans have no particular need to worry, since the only things a Transhuman needs to survive are an energy source, matter, nanomass, computing power, and knowledgebases.
And to a Transhuman, the survival of the human species is the last thing to be concerned about. The only thing of interest to a Transhuman is how do we get to that state without having to waste a lot of time and energy killing humans trying to prevent us from getting there.
Humans aren't going to colonize the universe or even the Solar System - that seems clear. Transhumans will.
Which makes Stross's analysis a waste of time. Considering that he admits he had a cold when developing this and thus couldn't think straight, I'd say that pretty much sums up the value of this piece.
I've read the same article a dozen times in the past year.
"China is the enemy"
"China is a threat"
"China is growing too powerful to be interested in peace."
Yada, yada.
It's ALL bullshit.
The US government, like all governments, NEEDS "enemies" to justify its existence. If it doesn't have a significant enemy, it will create one. Ergo, Iraq, Iran, North Korea - and China - and now even Russia AGAIN.
Of course, the Chinese government is doing the same thing to ITS people. Just substitute "the USA" for the above statements about being a threat.
Meanwhile the citizenry of every country continues to pay through the nose in taxes and regulations to people whose sole function in life is to order everybody else around and start wars to justify their existence.
Suckers.
You want peace?
Kill your "leaders".
Then pay attention to your own business and leave everybody else alone to deal with theirs.
The real problem is the crappy server edition. I have a client who has had nothing but trouble with the latest Enterprise edition. Numerous bugs and updates have pissed him off.
Plus you have to run the Server side software as ADMINISTRATOR on Windows! There is supposedly a way to let it run under a normal user account, but it's complicated.
This means that the software that most small-business CPA's and small business finance managers use is running on a totally insecure operating system in ADMINISTRATOR mode!
Might as well just post everybody's financial information on the Web...Save the hackers a little work...
Intuit is just another example of a company, like Microsoft itself, like Adobe, Symantec and numerous others, that have reached their limiting "bloat level" and are now almost unusable as products.
I really don't know why the OSS community hasn't wiped QuickBooks off the map yet. It's just a financial application and it shouldn't be that hard to come up with an OSS version that does exactly what it does.
"The second is that private meetings, foreign pressures and lobbyist drafted bills is how law gets made in Canada"
Hey, that's how it gets made EVERYWHERE - especially in the United States.
When a US Senator gets a half million dollar bribe from the Turkish lobby to kill the Turkey-Armenia bill, well, that's just chicken feed compared to what else goes on in the "land of the free".
Slashdot Mirror
Read it and weep.
/page11.html
IBM'er says Vista's RAM sweet spot is 4GB
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?com mand=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9011523
Anandtech:
http://www.anandtech.com/systems/showdoc.aspx?i=29 17&p=4
"While it's very difficult to benchmark the impact of SuperFetch well, in our usage of Vista if you have enough memory it is a tremendous ally. Honestly SuperFetch is the biggest reason, in our opinion, to move to the x64 version of Vista so you can use even more memory. Although we found that 2GB of memory is still quite passable under Vista, the new sweet spot if you happen to multitask a lot is 4GB - in no small part due to how well SuperFetch utilizes the additional memory. Do keep in mind that you'll need to make sure your motherboard has proper BIOS support for 4GB and also make sure Vista x64 has driver support for all of your peripherals before committing to the move....
How much RAM do you really need for Windows Vista? We recommend a bare minimum of 1GB of memory for all Vista users, 2GB if you're a power user but don't have a lot running at the same time, and 4GB if you hate the sound of swapping to disk...."
Tom's Hardware:
http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/01/29/xp-vs-vista
"Conclusion: K.O. For Windows Vista?
Windows Vista clearly is not a great new performer when it comes to executing single applications at maximum speed. Although we only looked at the 32-bit version of Windows Vista Enterprise, we do not expect the 64-bit edition to be faster (at least not with 32-bit applications).
Overall, applications performed as expected, or executed slightly slower than under Windows XP. The synthetic benchmarks such as Everest, PCMark05 or Sandra 2007 show that differences are non-existent on a component level. We also found some programs that refused to work, and others that seem to cause problems at first but eventually ran properly. In any case, we recommend watching for Vista-related software upgrades from your software vendors.
There are some programs that showed deeply disappointing performance. Unreal Tournament 2004 and the professional graphics benchmarking suite SPECviewperf 9.03 suffered heavily from the lack of support for the OpenGL graphics library under Windows Vista. This is something we expected, and we clearly advise against replacing Windows XP with Windows Vista if you need to run professional graphics applications. Both ATI and Nvidia will offer OpenGL support in upcoming driver releases, but it remains to be seen if and how other graphics vendors or Microsoft may offer it.
We are disappointed that CPU-intensive applications such as video transcoding with XviD (DVD to XviD MPEG4) or the MainConcept H.264 Encoder performed 18% to nearly 24% slower in our standard benchmark scenarios. Both benchmarks finished much quicker under Windows XP. There aren't newer versions available, and we don't see immediate solutions to this issue.
There is good news as well: we did not find evidence that Windows Vista's new and fancy AeroGlass interface consumes more energy than Windows XP's 2D desktop. Although our measurements indicate a 1 W increase in power draw at the plug, this is too little of a difference to draw any conclusions. Obviously, the requirements for displaying all elements in 3D, rotating and moving them aren't enough to heat up graphics processors. This might also be a result of Windows Vista's more advanced implementation of ACPI 2.0 (and parts of 3.0), which allows the control of power of system components separately.
Our hopes that Vista might be able to speed up applications are gone. First tests with 64-bit editions result in numbers similar to our 32
You're right about site licenses - but I deal with small businesses who don't use site licenses because they buy machines individually as they need them.
2GB of RAM is $80-100 - multiply that by every machine in the company - and that's assuming the motherboards are set for a maximum of 4GB of RAM and can take 1-2GB sticks...
Do you have any idea how many small businesses - not big corporations that routinely swap out machines every three years because they've amortized them out - are running on four, five, six, seven year old machines that are perfectly fine for office workers with XP? Or that almost all office machines not used for video editing are probably running with 512MB of RAM - which is more than adequate for ninety percent of office workers?
Yes, the hardware requirements for Vista are a problem. Every single industry report has said that. Some people have said that the "sweet spot" for Vista performance is FOUR gigs of RAM. Numerous people have complained that it is dog slow on recent machines with 1-2GB of RAM, depending on applications mix, even a minimal applications mix.
Your experience is essentially irrelevant - a single data point at odds with most others reported for months now.
"If one of your machines dies, you can use its license on the next machine"
Not if it's a Dell - those licenses are tied to the motherboard. Motherboard dies, Dell tells you buy a new copy of XP. One very good reason - along with "Recovery Partitions" and "Recovery CDs" and crapware - never to buy a Dell.
I'm telling my clients who don't have full-fledged install CDs for XP to make sure they get them before the end of the year if they expect to keep using their XP machines past this year. None of this "recovery partition" shit which is useless if your hard drive dies. And "recovery CDs" only work on the same machines and are useless for stuff like System File Check.
The IT industry is presently in a state of full-fledged FRAUD as far as supporting businesses goes: they provide inadequate support for failing machines, they load crapware on the new machines that screws the machines when you remove it (McAfee or Norton frequently do not uninstall properly), and Microsoft is basically forcing wholesale hardware upgrades for essentially little or no benefit other than Bill Gates personal wealth.
It may take another ten years, but sooner or later corporations are going to get seriously sick of this nonsense - and the backlash will put quite a few large IT companies out of business abd provide a major boost to OSS.
Microsoft has now ADMITTED that the National Security Agency had two sets of teams - "red" to determine how to break in, and "blue" to "assist" in designing Vista security - working on Vista.
This means, of course, to anyone with a brain, that the NSA figured out X ways to break into Vista - and told Microsoft about X - n of them (pick your numbers, the idea is the same.)
This means that any government or foreign corporation who uses Vista has just handed the farm to the NSA.
Anybody outside of the US - and any moron inside the US - who uses Vista has to have their head examined.
Oh, sure, the NSA doesn't care about me, or you, so they aren't probing our boxes - right?
Right.
This is way worse than the old story about the hidden "NSA keys" - at least that time Microsoft didn't admit that the NSA had actively been invited to break Windows security (although I wouldn't be surprised if they had been and did.)
People who compare this to SELinux simply don't know what they're talking about. There's no comparison whatsoever, as SELinux is open source.
Mainframes ARE dead - for ninety nine percent of the world's corporations. Who cares if a handful of morons have specific requirements for large processors with large I/O bandwidths?
Everybody likes to claim Windows outsells Linux by looking at the revenue figures rather than the units figures.
How about how much money mainframes bring in vs the rest of the hardware industry?
A recent study said the primary reason for moving from non-mainframe architectures to mainframes was:
"improved workload management, performance, availability, and security coupled with reduced costs for electrical power, cooling, floor space, and support staffs."
Which of course only applies to the data center, not to anything else in the IT world.
Here's an example of what more advanced people are doing:
Linux grid takes out firm's aging mainframe
By Jack Loftus, News Writer
04 Jan 2007 | SearchOpenSource.com
R.L. Polk & Co., one of the oldest providers of automotive information in the U.S., had a mainframe problem.
In December, IBM touted a 100% increase in the number of ISV applications available for its mainframe offering, System z. More than 390 IBM business partners now offer nearly 1,000 applications for System z customers running Linux, IBM said.
Analyst firm Ptak Noel & Associates also identified the trend in a report released this month, but conceded it was unable to get IBM to disclose if growth was due to internal development on mainframe, or actual production use. Overall, mainframes grew from 2% to 7% on the year, a Ptak report said.
In addition, IBM business partners reported increased customer interest in new IBM technology including the z9 Integrated Information Processor (zIIP) and z Application Assistant Processor (zAAP) specialty engines. More than 60% of IBM mainframe revenue is now driven by new workloads, with approximately 20% of revenue and 30% of MIPS (million instructions per second) coming from Linux customers.
"The story of IBM's mainframe experience is still being written and it looks to be a story of impressive rebirth, renewal and return," the Ptak report said.
Apparently RLP Technologies didn't get the memo.
The mainframe -- an IBM 2066-002, part of the zSeries line -- was unable to keep up with the demands of crunching data on 500 million unique vehicles every year. Some of the data processing jobs on the mainframe would often take several days to complete. Parts of the infrastructure at Polk were close to 20 years old when executives first started looking elsewhere for solutions in 2004.
With about 4.5 petabytes of stored information on hand, the mainframe took on the persona of a lumbering behemoth. This was especially the case when the IT staff had to accommodate new business requirements such as a car dealership adding a new type of vehicle to its inventory. Each update required a major rework of the program, said Mick Isiminger, director of IT operations at RLP Technologies, a wholly-owned research and development subsidiary of Polk.
And the amount of information on hand was growing. As one of the largest providers of automotive consumer information, Polk tasked RLP Technologies (RLPT) with finding, configuring and deploying a higher performance and more flexible alternative.
Grid computing versus mainframe
Leading the effort, Isiminger said the decision was made early on to switch out the mainframe and go with a grid computing environment. Why a grid? Because it offered a "loosely coupled environment" that could adapt to change more easily than a mainframe, he said.
Grid computing performs higher throughput computing by distributing processes across a group of servers. Grids use the resources of this network to solve large-scale computations.
They can also perform computations on large data sets by breaking them into many smaller ones. Grids are a popular form of computing in academic and scientific environments, and organizations like the Open Grid Forum have f
"selective and perhaps discriminatory enforcement by police."
Laws are made to create crime, so the state can selectively and in a discriminatory manner harass its citizens. That is the PURPOSE of law - to allow one class of people to brand another class as "criminals". It has nothing to do with "protecting and serving".
The only good police are dead police. Ditto politicians.
Are we in a hurry?
I got a client hasn't paid me $800 in 22 days. That matters.
Who cares if a company's legal department takes 22 days to release source code? It takes most companies 22 days to find their ass with both hands.
Let them try this.
Five minutes later, some Taiwan or mainland Chinese company will be formed to make printers without it.
Five years later, the entire inkjet printer industry will be out of business.
Not to mention that the cost of laser printers is coming down enough that soon the inkjet printer will be off the market anyway. Color lasers are going for $600 now. If the inkjet people start charging $50/cartridge, the laser printers will drop to $200-300, and anybody with a brain will see that inkjets are worthless.
The managers of ALL companies in ALL industries just don't get it. You cannot FORCE people to pay for your product. You have to provide a REASON to buy your crap.
Here's your fundamental flaw in so-called "capitalism". Your managers depend on the very people who are stockholders in their companies - and then proceed to screw those people both as consumers and as stockholders by ripping them off in the marketplace and then cooking the books so the company goes under.
The only reason it works is because the morons who are stockholders think that if they have a crooked management who rips off their customers that the company will make more profit and they will get higher shareholder value. They forget that the same assholes who are ripping off the consumer are ripping THEM off!
Morons.
When are you morons going to realize that management are nothing more than alpha primates who are born with the intent of fucking you over? They can't do anything else - it's in their monkey genes.
You forget to mention "Microsoft shill" as an option.
Oh, wait, you did say "idiot". That covers the shills, too.
Never mind.
You know, you might have hit on it!
Bigelow's whole idea is a space hotel! The guy made his money in hotels!
Dreamhost offers 200GB of Web space (well, 148GB now, they drop it a bit every little while - but it can go up to nearly 400GB), AND offers a file storage plan where you pay, IIRC, $2.50 per gig ONE TIME for them to host the file FOREVER (or until they go out of business, whichever comes first.)
I knew you could.
Can you say "moron "?
Anybody who would put their name to a typically stupid Microsoft phrase like "Where do you want to go today?" (to hell, if you use any Microsoft product!) or "people-ready business" (businesses run by chimpanzees, which certainly fits Microsoft!) is not only a shill but a moron.
THIS is "insightful"?
Sure, OSS programs are poorly commented.
So are commercial source programs.
ALL programs are poorly commented and documented, because nobody teaches the morons in this industry to do their job properly.
I've NEVER seen a decently commented program other than ones I've written. NEVER - in thirty years of being in the business. I've seen a FEW with SOME comments that were useful. But properly commented - oh, hell, no.
Obviously a Microsoft shill from day one. It was obvious then - it's obvious now.
In twelve hours, there will be twenty security experts ripping holes in this moron's so-called "analysis."
Vista is not secure - NOTHING made by Microsoft is secure. Period. End of story. They could work from now to the end of this century, employ nanotechnology and advanced artificial intelligence - and their crap would STILL be unreliable, insecure, and complicated to use. It's a matter of corporate culture and attitude, not security knowledge or technology. Bill Gates simply does not give a shit about ANYTHING but sucking money out of his customers wallets at any cost to those customers well-being, corporate or home, it doesn't matter.
Nothing to see here, move along.
of absolute freak?
And I thought I was weird. All I did was rob two banks, did some time and overeat burgers and Hagen Daaz.
I don't think I've ever had any friends who carved things into their arms (not that there's anything wrong with B&D, or other fetish behavior - except the juvenility of it all, of course.)
Humans are seriously fucked up.
This story is an example of how you seriously need to check out who you associate with. Other people will get you in prison as fast as you can do it on your own.
that says I'm posting too fast to the discussion - WHEN THE DISCUSSION IS HOURS OLD AND NOBODY ELSE IS POSTING - I don't give a shit what you've changed.
Buy another server if you can't handle the load. morons.
I mean, really, it's friggin' obvious. Every one of these wireless companies throws out a new router every month, then spends the next six to 12 months uploading firmware fixes for that model to their Web sites because of the bugs. It's obvious that the whole thing is being driven by marketing, not the actual technology.
They simply can't make the stuff work reliably with their OWN hardware, let alone connecting to anybody else's hardware.
And when you add in the flaky wireless software drivers and management software - good luck with that.
If you're going to use wireless in a business, put one wireless AP for every one or two users at most. And don't even bother if those users need to run Microsoft Access databases over the network, because it won't work. Make sure all the servers are wired, the main Internet access is wired, and the only thing the wireless APs do is connect one or two users per AP to a wired connection to the rest of the network. That way, you avoid stringing wire all over the office, but you still have solid wired connections where it matters. How you can set that up for any significant number of people is beyond me, however. This sort of solution would only work with maybe 25 users. Maybe you could do it on a floor by floor basis and sill run wire between floors only.
Even then, if you don't own your own building, and/or have office buildings around you with wireless using tenants, you're going to have interference problems unless you spend the big bucks for high-powered Cisco gear that can swamp the other guys lower cost stuff power output.
When wireless works - in a home with no interference problems - or in an Internet cafe - it's great. When it doesn't, it's a nightmare to fix.
It's not a technology to base a business on. It's just too complicated and it just isn't reliable enough.
Well, get used to it, because it's beginning to sound like the wave of the future.
Some Internet cafes and other outfits providing "free" wireless access are doing it because of ad revenue they get by serving ads. The ads appear like a banner on top of your Web browser. It does NOT insert into your content but rides on top of it in the Web browser in a frame. The ads are inserted by a server that is sent the browser request via the wireless router running OpenWRT or similar products. The browser request is rerouted by the router to the server which retrieves the original request, inserts the ad and returns the combination to the browser.
You get free Net access, the provider gets a piece of the ad revenue and a free router to advertise free Net access to attract customers to his business, the server provider gets revenue, and the advertiser gets local targeted ads based on the location and nature of the wireless access provider to potential local customers (or national if that's the advertiser.)
There are a number of companies doing this now, and I expect it to take off. Ad-supported media has a long history in this country.
The one time somebody uses the term "cracker" vs "hacker" correctly (supposedly) and everybody at
You can't make this stuff up, folks.
And here we find out Gates "doesn't do email." I thought Andrea Corr was technologically illiterate when she admitted only learning how to do email in fall of 2005 (sister Caroline told her, "Don't tell people that!").
But here we have more evidence of the nature of managers - reflecting the joke from the publishing world many years ago. A publisher and his editor entered an elevator. The editor was carrying an armload of bags and manuscripts. The publisher wasn't. The publisher pointed to the editor: "You, editor. Me, publisher."
Flunkies do email and bring the results to the people with the real power.
Feudalism lives.
I would have expected Stross to be a bit more imaginative, given some of his stories emphasizing Transhuman societies such as Accelerando. However, lack of imagination is just as prevalent among sci-fi writers as it is in the general population. I've seen enough stupid sci-fi writer essays to be assured of that.
Humans per se aren't going anywhere. Within this century, the human body and brain will be made obsolete. Transhumans will have the intelligence to solve technological problems unimagined by humans. But even if interstellar movement remains non-feasible, Transhumans have no particular need to worry, since the only things a Transhuman needs to survive are an energy source, matter, nanomass, computing power, and knowledgebases.
And to a Transhuman, the survival of the human species is the last thing to be concerned about. The only thing of interest to a Transhuman is how do we get to that state without having to waste a lot of time and energy killing humans trying to prevent us from getting there.
Humans aren't going to colonize the universe or even the Solar System - that seems clear. Transhumans will.
Which makes Stross's analysis a waste of time. Considering that he admits he had a cold when developing this and thus couldn't think straight, I'd say that pretty much sums up the value of this piece.
I've read the same article a dozen times in the past year.
"China is the enemy"
"China is a threat"
"China is growing too powerful to be interested in peace."
Yada, yada.
It's ALL bullshit.
The US government, like all governments, NEEDS "enemies" to justify its existence. If it doesn't have a significant enemy, it will create one. Ergo, Iraq, Iran, North Korea - and China - and now even Russia AGAIN.
Of course, the Chinese government is doing the same thing to ITS people. Just substitute "the USA" for the above statements about being a threat.
Meanwhile the citizenry of every country continues to pay through the nose in taxes and regulations to people whose sole function in life is to order everybody else around and start wars to justify their existence.
Suckers.
You want peace?
Kill your "leaders".
Then pay attention to your own business and leave everybody else alone to deal with theirs.
The real problem is the crappy server edition. I have a client who has had nothing but trouble with the latest Enterprise edition. Numerous bugs and updates have pissed him off.
Plus you have to run the Server side software as ADMINISTRATOR on Windows! There is supposedly a way to let it run under a normal user account, but it's complicated.
This means that the software that most small-business CPA's and small business finance managers use is running on a totally insecure operating system in ADMINISTRATOR mode!
Might as well just post everybody's financial information on the Web...Save the hackers a little work...
Intuit is just another example of a company, like Microsoft itself, like Adobe, Symantec and numerous others, that have reached their limiting "bloat level" and are now almost unusable as products.
I really don't know why the OSS community hasn't wiped QuickBooks off the map yet. It's just a financial application and it shouldn't be that hard to come up with an OSS version that does exactly what it does.
"The second is that private meetings, foreign pressures and lobbyist drafted bills is how law gets made in Canada"
Hey, that's how it gets made EVERYWHERE - especially in the United States.
When a US Senator gets a half million dollar bribe from the Turkish lobby to kill the Turkey-Armenia bill, well, that's just chicken feed compared to what else goes on in the "land of the free".
"Corrupt politicians" is a redundant phrase.
$60 billion not enough, George?
Here's my standard deal.
You pay me $1 billion in advance and I'll deliver Osama bin Laden to you dead or alive - your choice! But dead is easier - in ninety days.
Such a deal I offer you! How much have you spent - or not spent - so far on this little project?
And I'll probably make a nine hundred million dollar profit on the deal - which is my motivation.
Better take me up on it - before someone else offers me the same deal. Because I don't care who pays me.