So, you'd rather that every company keep any and discoveries they make as trade secrets then. So that all tech advancement will slow down. Great. We can look forward to lot of lost technology and many folks reinventing the wheel over and over agin. And lots more incompatible trade secret technologies. Great.
The founding fathers decided to reward people who made public their discoveries by giving them sole rights to those technologies for a limited number of years. That ensured there would be incentive to disclose those trade secrets. Letting all of society benefit from those advances for all future time(if that future started just 7 or so years later than for the discoverer).
The founding fathers were smart. They learned from history that when you have only trade secrets, progress is slower and technology is lost. Look at Damascus steel for a good example. Personally I'd prefer quicker public advances in technology. Yes, the patent system isn't great, but I think it's MUCH prefereble to not having one at all.
Because going over patent applications is kind of like working on cars...
You can have them faster, cheaper, or reliable. Pick any two.
The current system is a compromise because we really would like all three. Some bad ones will escape the system because we are trying to keep it halfway affordable, and done in what people consider a reasonable amount of time. That means some bad ones will slip through the system.
If you want to change it to make it realiable, you are going to have to either make it vastly more expensive to patent something, or take an extremely long time. While you might not have a problem with that, most people trying to patent something WOULD have a problem with that.
"How likely is it that anyone with 100 boxes is going to have all the patches work right first time, and not discover any issues moving forward? Not very."...
Guess what. The vast vast majority of MS patches don't break any thing on most networks. Apparently you aren't aware of that fact.
The next thing you need to learn, is that on large networks, computers are generally ordered in large batches, and people buy lines like Dell's Optiplex rather than Dimension, or Latitude rather than Inspiron. Why? Because it's guaranteed that we can order machines identical to them 6 months later when we might need another batch. The Dimension/Insprion lines have no such guarantee, and in fact change configurations constantly. Buy buying batches of these guaranteed identically configured machines the vast majority of machines on the network are one of a set of very few models. If the patches work on machine of that model, it will work on all of them. So we only have a handful of systems to test.
As far as trollish'isms go, you were the one putting words into my mouth stating that I was going to roll out patches with out installing them, and that I was going to roll them out on tuesday. I never said or suggested either such thing.
You should also learn that real knowledge goes from reading up and learning, not just googling to see how many times certain keywords pop up on certain websites. That tells you zero about the real content of those pages, as is shown by your lack of knowledge on how to implement such a system.
Lastly, I'm no MS Fanboy. I use MS, OpenBSD and OSX machines daily. I also know how to competently admin them. What I won't do is tell some Solaris admins how to admin their machines when I have no background knowledge on how it really should be done properly. I suggest you do the same the next time you tell windows admins how to run their networks when it's obvious that you yourself have no real clue how to do it properly.
So that's why you thought folks would have to reboot their machine 13 times each, and that anyone with 100 boxes would be rebooting till Valentine's day. Because you already knew about SUS server. Right. Idiot troll.
Once again Mr. Troll, where did I say what day I was going to roll them out. First you have no clue that there is even a tool to make rollouts at large sites painless, and now you just assume every bad admin move that can be done will be done. The great grandparent was wrong, you are both clueless AND a troll. A very sad combination. Pathetic really.
Since neither I nor any admin I know, nor the admins at thousands of other large institutions had such a problem in November, I'd say they are running some very non-standard configuration and didn't bother to test things before rolling them out. That's just bad administration. The same could happen on a *nix platform if the admins are incompetent. What was your point?
psst. When you use Linux in an embeded system, you have to let folks know and make the source available. When a company decides to use a BSD in their hardware, they have to tell... no one. Exactly how are you going to track who uses NetBSD in the embedded world? The companies don't have to tell you that they are using it.
I went back and read the longer article. The cost for launch is actually included. Now if they can actually keep the building costs down to what they are projected as... Remember, the Hubble was originally going to cost $475 million. It ended up being $1,175 million.
I believe the cost listed is just to build the replacement, while the rescue mission includes the costs of a launch. Launching such a big heavy instrument is going to add significantly to the costs involved.
I'm not saying making a replacement for Hubble instead of saving it wouldn't be a good thing. I just think the costs compared shoudl be apples to apples, not apples to half an apple.;)
FYI, Microsoft has WUS server in beta testing. It's going to replace SUS server, and it rolls out patches to Office, etc, as well.
You can download it and try it if you like. I downloaded it, but haven't had time to try it out yet. So I don't know about the logging in it or anything yet.
You must get all your 'knowledge' from google, because it's obvious you have never actually had to install updates on 1000 machines yourself. If you did, you'd find MS has a nice toold called SUS server, that will roll them out to your network for you. No need to 'reboot till valentines day'
As the grandparent said, you are either clueless or a troll.
Re:Oh look! Their project plan is online!
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Hondas in Space
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Exactly, when I read him talking about using milk trucks tanks I thought to myself NO! You need to use the back end of a cement mixer! That was a good bad show.
What's amusing to me is that you don't argue that Windows doesn't really have the stated problems... either it's good enough or it's a problem begging to be fixed, which is it?
Amusing? I'm sitting here with a Windows XP laptop, a 12" Apple powerbook running OSX, and an OpenBSD 3.6 desktop in front of me. I'm always for using the right tool for the job at hand. I just think telling all windows users that they should switch to OSX is just... silly. OSX is not the end-all be-all. It has it's benifits, but it has it's own problems as well.
But businesses buy new computers on a regular basis- most every 3 years or so. Why not change OS on the same schedule?
Most buisnesses don't replace all their machines at once. So for at least three years your techs are going to have to support an additional desktop OS, and all the applications that go along with it. That's no small expense. Plus retraining all your staff. That's another big expense. On top of that, you are recommending moving to more expensive hardware platform. There better be a huge financial incentive to make that move.
As far as Exchange goes, the integration of everything is one of the main selling points for using the system. Using MeetingMaker and a separate IMAP email client, and a separate database, app, and a separate yadda yadda yadda, just doesn't compare.
More interesting is the less-academic "what would it take to get people to change operating systems ?" - in the past, there would have been a longer list of needed things, but now the dominant thing seems to be "games", which I find weird, because there's a huge stack of Mac games and more all the time.
In case you haven't noticed. Switching to MacOS is not just getting people to change their operating system. They also have to buy new, and more expensive, hardware. You can argue all you want that the prices are getting closer to what PC prices are, but switching would sitll entail throwing out working hardware to buy new.
in a few cases, "my marketing guys like Exchange servers" even though alternatives ( even better alternatives ) can be found, it boils down to "I'm used to my dark cave".
What's the better alternative to Exchange servers? What's more feature rich for email, calandar scheduling, etc, etc?
The 'editors' here don't even read their own site to prevent dupe stories. Now you think they are going to actually read the article posted, and also do background research for it?
You need to find better documentation. Actually Apple did make an offer to buy BeOS, but they didn't offer as much as Jean-Lois Gasee and the other Be stockholders wanted, so their offer was turned down. Rather than up their offer on BeOS and pay more than they thought it was worth at the time, they went with NeXT. Those 'sound engineering reasons' came as justification after the financial ones had already been made.
This is also one of those things that is difficult to truely privitize. Remember, in order to lay fiber cable, etc to everyone in the city, the company doing it has to use public land to run the cables in. They get a tremendous use out of things the public owns, so although they may be charging you for their product, they are making large use of something you and the general public own. To put a wireless system, they will be broadcasting over public air space.
In other cases, the city itself may take on the responsibility of providing a service to the general public which will need similar use of these public spaces. Your may be buying water from your city's water service. They have pipes (much like the telephone wires or television cable) which run all accross public property. Although your taxes may pay for some of the infrastructure to put such a system in place. It's the actual consumers of such a program who generally pay a large part of the cost (such as a monthly water bill). If you don't want the cities water, you can have your water turned off, and you won't recieve a monthly bill. A similar type system could easily be put in place for the wireless system to put the bulk of the financial burden on the actual users.
As I said in my post, I realize it happened ~20,000 years ago.
I'm still not following. Where does the number ll come in?? I thought the star exploded at ~year 18,000 BC, and we are now seeing the light from year (18,000 BC + 3). It doesn't matter if we are seeing light from an area of the cloud closer to us, or perpendicular to us relative to the star. The farthest the light should be able to travel before bouncing toward us in time for us to see it now is 3 years, so that would make a 6 ly maximum diameter. How can an area 14 ly across appear to be lit up from the explosion? Are you saying the flash travels a lot slower than the echo?)
Ok, I'm astro dumb, so please explain this to me. They say that we saw the star explode 3 years ago, our time. The picture of the lite-up cloud of gas is, according to the caption to the photo on that page you linked to:
The Hubble image spans about 14 light-years at the estimated 20,000 light-year distance to V838 Mon.
Almost the entire image is filled with the bright cloud. If the star exploded three years ago (our time, I know, 20,000 really), shouldn't the light from it only have made it out to parts of the cloud 3 light-years distance in each direction, or a ~6 light-year diameter? I would think we would only see a 6 light-year diameter area of lite-up cloud, rather than the ~12-13 light-year diameter one in the image according to the caption.
Don't worry about the violence. It's not necessary.
Worry about the problem of leaving the thumbs at home though. That's a real concern. Going about your daily activities everyday, you don't leave tons of impressions of your credit card numbers. You do leave lots of impressions of your fingerprints. That's why cops can dust for them on all sorts of materiels that might be touched everyday by someone. Doorknobs, walls, a drinking glass, etc.
Who's going to risk attacking you in an alley for your fingerprints? You might fight back. You might know martial arts, heck, you might have a gun. Why take that risk? All they have to do is snag your glass from the table at the restaurant you just finished eating at. No confrontation, no risk, and your biometric security is now screwed forever since you can't just go get a new set of thumbprints.
5. Your time is worth something. Yes, you can find all sorts of useful tips and manuals for everything online. But it can take time to track down the good sources. Haveing someone else already do that and index and collate it for you is very handy.
Only if they are going to make good use of your own system. For others Sun's deal will be very cost effective.
Suppose you do some fancy quarterly statistics/forcasting analysis that take 20 hours on that 1,000 CPU cluster( which would have taken you 833 days to run on a single CPU machine). That might be your only major need for intense CPU power.
That's when you want to use these clusters. For the price of $20,000 each quarter you can avoid the cost of a 1000 cpu cluster (which will be several hundred thousand dollars at least), plus building space, maintenance, cooling, power, administration cost, etc, etc, etc. Plus SUN will likely be upgrading their clusters regularly, and that would be an additional cost to you to keep upgrading your own cluster. Sun's deal makes a lot of sense for occasional use high intensity jobs.
If you have enough researchers doing enough things to keep one busy most of the time, then yes, you are right, it would be cost effective to build your own. But there are going to be a lot of places that don't have such a high continual need.
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The founding fathers decided to reward people who made public their discoveries by giving them sole rights to those technologies for a limited number of years. That ensured there would be incentive to disclose those trade secrets. Letting all of society benefit from those advances for all future time(if that future started just 7 or so years later than for the discoverer).
The founding fathers were smart. They learned from history that when you have only trade secrets, progress is slower and technology is lost. Look at Damascus steel for a good example. Personally I'd prefer quicker public advances in technology. Yes, the patent system isn't great, but I think it's MUCH prefereble to not having one at all.
You can have them faster, cheaper, or reliable. Pick any two.
The current system is a compromise because we really would like all three. Some bad ones will escape the system because we are trying to keep it halfway affordable, and done in what people consider a reasonable amount of time. That means some bad ones will slip through the system.
If you want to change it to make it realiable, you are going to have to either make it vastly more expensive to patent something, or take an extremely long time. While you might not have a problem with that, most people trying to patent something WOULD have a problem with that.
Guess what. The vast vast majority of MS patches don't break any thing on most networks. Apparently you aren't aware of that fact.
The next thing you need to learn, is that on large networks, computers are generally ordered in large batches, and people buy lines like Dell's Optiplex rather than Dimension, or Latitude rather than Inspiron. Why? Because it's guaranteed that we can order machines identical to them 6 months later when we might need another batch. The Dimension/Insprion lines have no such guarantee, and in fact change configurations constantly. Buy buying batches of these guaranteed identically configured machines the vast majority of machines on the network are one of a set of very few models. If the patches work on machine of that model, it will work on all of them. So we only have a handful of systems to test.
As far as trollish'isms go, you were the one putting words into my mouth stating that I was going to roll out patches with out installing them, and that I was going to roll them out on tuesday. I never said or suggested either such thing.
You should also learn that real knowledge goes from reading up and learning, not just googling to see how many times certain keywords pop up on certain websites. That tells you zero about the real content of those pages, as is shown by your lack of knowledge on how to implement such a system.
Lastly, I'm no MS Fanboy. I use MS, OpenBSD and OSX machines daily. I also know how to competently admin them. What I won't do is tell some Solaris admins how to admin their machines when I have no background knowledge on how it really should be done properly. I suggest you do the same the next time you tell windows admins how to run their networks when it's obvious that you yourself have no real clue how to do it properly.
So that's why you thought folks would have to reboot their machine 13 times each, and that anyone with 100 boxes would be rebooting till Valentine's day. Because you already knew about SUS server. Right. Idiot troll.
Once again Mr. Troll, where did I say what day I was going to roll them out. First you have no clue that there is even a tool to make rollouts at large sites painless, and now you just assume every bad admin move that can be done will be done. The great grandparent was wrong, you are both clueless AND a troll. A very sad combination. Pathetic really.
Since neither I nor any admin I know, nor the admins at thousands of other large institutions had such a problem in November, I'd say they are running some very non-standard configuration and didn't bother to test things before rolling them out. That's just bad administration. The same could happen on a *nix platform if the admins are incompetent. What was your point?
psst. When you use Linux in an embeded system, you have to let folks know and make the source available. When a company decides to use a BSD in their hardware, they have to tell... no one. Exactly how are you going to track who uses NetBSD in the embedded world? The companies don't have to tell you that they are using it.
http://history.msfc.nasa.gov/book/chpttwelve.pdf
I'm not saying making a replacement for Hubble instead of saving it wouldn't be a good thing. I just think the costs compared shoudl be apples to apples, not apples to half an apple. ;)
You can download it and try it if you like. I downloaded it, but haven't had time to try it out yet. So I don't know about the logging in it or anything yet.
And who said we don't test them first mr troll?
As the grandparent said, you are either clueless or a troll.
Exactly, when I read him talking about using milk trucks tanks I thought to myself NO! You need to use the back end of a cement mixer! That was a good bad show.
Amusing? I'm sitting here with a Windows XP laptop, a 12" Apple powerbook running OSX, and an OpenBSD 3.6 desktop in front of me. I'm always for using the right tool for the job at hand. I just think telling all windows users that they should switch to OSX is just... silly. OSX is not the end-all be-all. It has it's benifits, but it has it's own problems as well.
But businesses buy new computers on a regular basis- most every 3 years or so. Why not change OS on the same schedule?
Most buisnesses don't replace all their machines at once. So for at least three years your techs are going to have to support an additional desktop OS, and all the applications that go along with it. That's no small expense. Plus retraining all your staff. That's another big expense. On top of that, you are recommending moving to more expensive hardware platform. There better be a huge financial incentive to make that move.
As far as Exchange goes, the integration of everything is one of the main selling points for using the system. Using MeetingMaker and a separate IMAP email client, and a separate database, app, and a separate yadda yadda yadda, just doesn't compare.
In case you haven't noticed. Switching to MacOS is not just getting people to change their operating system. They also have to buy new, and more expensive, hardware. You can argue all you want that the prices are getting closer to what PC prices are, but switching would sitll entail throwing out working hardware to buy new.
in a few cases, "my marketing guys like Exchange servers" even though alternatives ( even better alternatives ) can be found, it boils down to "I'm used to my dark cave".
What's the better alternative to Exchange servers? What's more feature rich for email, calandar scheduling, etc, etc?
Dream on.
http://macspeedzone.com/archive/art/con/be.shtml
In other cases, the city itself may take on the responsibility of providing a service to the general public which will need similar use of these public spaces. Your may be buying water from your city's water service. They have pipes (much like the telephone wires or television cable) which run all accross public property. Although your taxes may pay for some of the infrastructure to put such a system in place. It's the actual consumers of such a program who generally pay a large part of the cost (such as a monthly water bill). If you don't want the cities water, you can have your water turned off, and you won't recieve a monthly bill. A similar type system could easily be put in place for the wireless system to put the bulk of the financial burden on the actual users.
Comprehension finally dawns :). Thanks for the illustration. It's been way way too long for me since basic geometry.
I'm still not following. Where does the number ll come in?? I thought the star exploded at ~year 18,000 BC, and we are now seeing the light from year (18,000 BC + 3). It doesn't matter if we are seeing light from an area of the cloud closer to us, or perpendicular to us relative to the star. The farthest the light should be able to travel before bouncing toward us in time for us to see it now is 3 years, so that would make a 6 ly maximum diameter. How can an area 14 ly across appear to be lit up from the explosion? Are you saying the flash travels a lot slower than the echo?)
The Hubble image spans about 14 light-years at the estimated 20,000 light-year distance to V838 Mon.
Almost the entire image is filled with the bright cloud. If the star exploded three years ago (our time, I know, 20,000 really), shouldn't the light from it only have made it out to parts of the cloud 3 light-years distance in each direction, or a ~6 light-year diameter? I would think we would only see a 6 light-year diameter area of lite-up cloud, rather than the ~12-13 light-year diameter one in the image according to the caption.Worry about the problem of leaving the thumbs at home though. That's a real concern. Going about your daily activities everyday, you don't leave tons of impressions of your credit card numbers. You do leave lots of impressions of your fingerprints. That's why cops can dust for them on all sorts of materiels that might be touched everyday by someone. Doorknobs, walls, a drinking glass, etc.
Who's going to risk attacking you in an alley for your fingerprints? You might fight back. You might know martial arts, heck, you might have a gun. Why take that risk? All they have to do is snag your glass from the table at the restaurant you just finished eating at. No confrontation, no risk, and your biometric security is now screwed forever since you can't just go get a new set of thumbprints.
5. Your time is worth something. Yes, you can find all sorts of useful tips and manuals for everything online. But it can take time to track down the good sources. Haveing someone else already do that and index and collate it for you is very handy.
Suppose you do some fancy quarterly statistics/forcasting analysis that take 20 hours on that 1,000 CPU cluster( which would have taken you 833 days to run on a single CPU machine). That might be your only major need for intense CPU power.
That's when you want to use these clusters. For the price of $20,000 each quarter you can avoid the cost of a 1000 cpu cluster (which will be several hundred thousand dollars at least), plus building space, maintenance, cooling, power, administration cost, etc, etc, etc. Plus SUN will likely be upgrading their clusters regularly, and that would be an additional cost to you to keep upgrading your own cluster. Sun's deal makes a lot of sense for occasional use high intensity jobs.
If you have enough researchers doing enough things to keep one busy most of the time, then yes, you are right, it would be cost effective to build your own. But there are going to be a lot of places that don't have such a high continual need.
Don't taunt the zealots. Just drink the kool-aid.