Interesting ideas, but can anybody show me *any* significant, quantitative, comparative proof of improved ROI?
I can't. I watched a very large organization replace a duct tape model that worked with a service based architecture that never delivered a single working service in 3 years of massively increased spending.
Use the duct tape apps to prove user acceptance and usability. Then take the apps that work and rebuild them on a more solid code foundation. If all your apps are using a common database back end, they'll all be able to talk to one another. Where companies really dork themselves is when half their user apps are using Access as a back end, some using SQL Server, a couple OSS mods using MySQL and then a dozen different hosted apps like SalesForce.
In my experience it's better to have a bunch of duct tape apps that provide an 80% solutions while more long term development is going on than having your data scattered around in hosted applications outside the company.
it's just real hard to put up with their temperament sometimes, and the smell
Temperament I'll give you but there is hardly any smell, unless you run mature males in your herd. Most people don't for that very reason. When the boys are about 3 months old, they get a castration band and never develop that musky smell intact males get around breeding season. I used to run a billy in our herd and he was the only source of any noticeable odor, except for a slight ammonia smell in their rain shelter. Don't keep any intact males and you can have an odor free herd.
and not to eat just a dumb eating machine like a goat.
You definitely haven't been around goats if you think they're dumb. In many countries goats live indoors with the family and are house broken, just like dogs. Goats are alert, curious and very intelligent creatures. I'd put them close to the dogs on the intelligence scale, although they're clever in different ways.
I'll take a look at the form handler...which needed work anyway. Thanks for pointing that out.
It depends on how long you have snow on the ground, if you have a barn, if you bail your own hay or buy it and if you buy it, square bales or round. Lot of variables. Rolled hay is cheaper than square bales but you have to keep the hay dry and the goats from climbing on it. And a tractor if you're going to move it very far. I could save a lot on feed costs by buying rolled corn in bulk instead of bags of 12% sweet feed. A grain bin would be a good investment if you're going to have more than 10 or 20.
I generally don't bunk hay until well into November, until the fallen tree leaves either rot or the goats clean them up. The good news is around here (western, TN) is right about then the wild onion and cool weather weeds start coming up. They do love wild onion. You can tell when they've been eating it, they'll come up and give you a big onion burp. Woooo.
If they have access to any kind of evergreens, they'll graze on those. But if you have pine stands, they'll kill smaller trees if you leave them out there. I've seen them browse pine leaves preferably, even when they have options. It's really weird to watch them. They'll ignore a certain type of plant for weeks, then one day they'll clean it all out and move on to something else.
Nope, they can pick off even tiny leaves off sticker bushes without getting stuck. There were places on the property that were stands of dead, stripped sticker stalks. A couple years ago you couldn't even see through those places. Their hide is tough so they don't have any trouble walking through the thickets. Their lips and tongues have amazing dexterity. They can pick individual pellets out of their grain bin while avoiding the moldy ones.
I have a blog if you're interested. I'll try to get some video of them browsing to show how precise they can be, but it's hard because any time I'm out in the pasture they crowd around begging for cookies. If nothing else I'll try to take some pictures of the decimated blackberry bushes.
Kudzu makes decent forage. Kudzu hay typically has a 15-18% crude protein content and over 60% total digestible nutrient value, slightly lower on longer vines. Unfortunately it's hard to bale and store.
Since it stores a lot of starch in the roots, they can regenerate for a long time. My goats will eat anything that doesn't break off in the ground, including the seed pods. If they're still around, kudzu won't be able to get started again. They'll eat any vines that start. That includes kudzu, but also wild grape vines, poison ivy, and just about anything else that grows on a vine.
If we could cultivate the market for goat meat in the US, those vast areas overgrown by kudzu would immediately turn into potential grazing land. Of course, in an environmentally sensitive area, the goats would be almost as hard on native plants as the kudzu. So there are trade offs both ways. But since goat is a red meat with roughly the same caloric value and 1/2 the fat of skinless chicken, 50% lower fat than beef, and 1/3 the calories of pork you'd think we'd be eating more goat.
Being from the south, I think I would rank kudzu above all.
My goats will clean up kudzu like it's candy. Not only will they strip the leaves, you'll see them standing on their hind legs trying to drag the vines down out of the trees. They eat leaves, vines, stems, roots and all. Reminds of a casino buffet on seafood night. And because they have a 4 chambered stomach, the digestion process pretty much kills the seeds. I've never seen them spread it anyway. As a bonus, goats can handle the terrain kudzu seems to thrive in.
If goats don't eat cogongrass, then that is some bad stuff. They can strip the leaves off blackberry bushes while avoiding the stickers, all they leave behind are stands of dead stalks. If it's that bad...that's a real problem.
It's almost like there are qualified, knowledgeable adults making policy decisions these days. Quite a difference from the days policy was dictated by partisan fund raisers who's qualifications were decided by how much money they could raise, right Brownie? Sometimes during the dark days it was like our government was being run by Romper Room.
Since the internet has made the sharing of even expert-level knowledge convenient...
People in college today are paying roughly the same per semester in state school that I was paying to go to a private college a couple decades ago. And, just like the health insurance industry, the costs are rising much faster than the rate of inflation would justify.
Before long, he claimed, the whole bloated, expensive, lecture-based higher education system will face the first challenge to its very existence: open-source, online higher education that costs a fraction of four years at Harvard--but is good enough for employers who want a college graduate.
That's certainly true for some classes. I had classes that were simply too big to offer any meaningful interaction with the teacher, some with hundreds of students. Those could be replaced with online offerings. Some majors could be done entirely online, many could not.
Once you get up out of the basics it's harder to replace with an online offering. You can't do clinicals or labs online and in some medical professions your last year is basically all clinicals. But it's possible we could replace a lot of the fringe classes and departments universities keep because of tenure requirements. Particularly those that don't require labs. Yeah, yeah insert standard tenured professor defense here. The bottom line is we just can't afford to keep going like we are. Something has to give, tenure will be one of those things.
Maybe we move the required classes online. History, English, sociology, foreign language requirements and universities shrink to offering advanced specialty classes and hands-on labs.
Education has to change, just like health insurance has to change. The systems we have for both are dysfunctional and costing us well beyond what they should. We can't handicap systems to benefit a few while imposing suffering on millions. We have to try something different.
Coverage at Ars also points out a provision that says, 'all Internet users must keep their connections "secure" and are responsible for what happens on them.
That sounds great, especially to those of us who have to deal with the Great Unwashed Masses PC problems, but most users are doing good to find the power switch. Making them responsible for what happens to the internals of their PC without their knowledge in a rapidly evolving threat landscape that even security professionals struggle with at times is blaming the victim. It's not their fault Windows is a highly porkable product.
They're teaching young people how to use computers in school but, with few exceptions, they're not teaching them how to use them safely. In many schools it would be the blind leading the blind in security education. Most teachers don't know enough about PC security to make any relevant contribution to solving the bigger problem. Ultimately, it's like trying to fight a fully involved house fire with a garden hose.
I'm not sure what the answer is, but I am glad that it's someone else being heavy-handed and dickish for a change.
I started a book years about a coordinated attack by a small group of people that blacked out the west coast for months. That was early 90's. Surprisingly little has changed. Security is better, but it's still astonishing how much of our power infrastructure is unprotected.
Almost as surprising is how few people are prepared for an extended power outage. Ever since I worked around power management systems, I've dragged around a generator and keep enough gas on hand to run it at least two weeks.
It says good things about our electrical grid that I've only needed the generator a handful of times in all those years. But I've also noticed over the years we've come to take the grid for granted and are woefully unprepared for a wide spread outage that lasted more than a week. An interesting mental exercise is to look around your house and think about what things would be worth without electricity.
I guess we're one of the approximations.;) Our office is more Ubuntu than Windows and people, astonishing to the Windows faithful, don't have any trouble getting their work done.
Almost any office could replace many, if not most, of their desktops with Ubuntu with very little difficulty. The level of effort increases to another level if you want to try replacing all of them.
Imagine having APT for a large percentage of your desktops. A couple keystrokes to run a script and they're all up to date. Sweet.
The U.S. Navy's and Marine Corp's NMCI computing infrastructure is all Windows XP.
I questioned the Navy's IT management for years, failing to see the long term wisdom behind the program and thinking it was a pork spending program awarded to political insiders. But, I'm forced to admit NMCI has been tremendously successful at bringing productivity to a near stand still. Patching computers no one can use is hardly even necessary.
As a bonus the Navy has an inexhaustible supply of boat anchors!
Until Linux can run botnet dll's and find a place among p0wn3d hacker machines, it's going to remain a hobbyist toy. It's so wasteful and inefficient to hack computers one at a time.
Until NASA can finish the next generation Ares I rocket, which isn't likely to be finished before 2017...
What the heck is taking so long? 7 and 1/2 more years for a modified spam can? WTF? It's not like we have no experience with ballistic re-entry vehicles and the lift vehicle design is based on components already in operation. Why is it going to take almost another decade to field a working booster? Okay, it's got problems. Anything that has to go 17,000 mph in space is going to take some work, but come on. We have solved those problems before. We're not reinventing the wheel. That just seems totally ridiculous.
Is it really that hard, are the contractors trying to milk the project, or has NASA become such a bloated bureaucracy that it takes 10 years to field lobster claw technology? Hell, bring the Russian engineers in. They'll weld the doors closed, kick it the butt and boost it up there.
Oh, baloney. It's common sense. If I see someone walking around with a weapon like that, I'm calling 911. Let the cops figure out it's a replica or someone exercising their open carry right. That's what they get paid for.
And if you don't have the common sense to box something like that before walking around outside, then I don't feel a bit sorry for you if you get questioned by the police. And I'd expect the police to treat the gun as real and you as a potential threat. Use your f'ing head. No one can spot replica weapons from a distance, or divine that you're not some wingnut bent on starting the Glenn Beck Cuckoo Revolution or someone who just got laid off going over the edge. There are too many mass casualty incidents in this country involving guns to leave it to chance.
The way I see it, if you're being a pro-gun militant and get shot because you can't exercise a grain of common sense along with your 2nd Amendment rights, then as far as I'm concerned you died of stupidity.
The spokeswoman added that Gmail could potentially replace Microsoft Exchange, 'but this decision has not been made yet.'"
Quit dorking around the flip the switch already. We did and it was the best move we ever made. It was a little rocky at first, then smooth sailing ever since. We've noticed two outages in the last year, I think there have been three total. Only the recent one generated any calls. Overall that makes it more reliable than Exchange.
Not sure what holds companies back from making the change. I've heard the arguments, they don't hold up to reality. Google doesn't spy on our email and if it's something really sensitive we can add a password to the document or encrypt the content. I've done that exactly once in the last year. Your company email passes unencrypted through dozens of relays, regardless of what email provider you use. Any one of those relays could be copying and storing those messages. So what would make Google any bigger risk than any one of them?
Backups are the other thing I hear about a lot. If it's that important, you can set up Gmail to auto-forward some or all of your messages to another account or you can use any number of tools in Windows, Linux and Mac to keep backups, if you feel the need. So far email backups have been a big waste of time and drive space, but I suppose it's better that small waste than a big loss if something bad did happen.
That change freed up a lot of money. We didn't need an Exchange admin and we saved a bundle on license fees.
...and that businesses and IT departments must adjust to the fact that everything's starting to move to the cloud.
I don't know about anyone else, but it chaps my butt when someone tells me I have to adjust to tech trend of the moment. I'll adjust when I'm good and ready. And I'll be ready when it makes business sense. Like service architecture, before that it was web services, go back far enough the hot buzz was client-server. I don't use what's trendy, I use what works.
Like moving email to "the cloud"...I hate that term. We dumped Exchange in favor of corporate Gmail and not only saved a fortune but it's a lot less stress to manage. We switched because it made good business sense, not because it was trendy. And no one really had to adjust because most of our staff was already using GMail at home.
We don't need a web OS, we use Ubuntu on a lot of desktops and Linux servers. A web OS might be an advantage...some day. But I can't really see what that advantage is now. So, no need to "adjust" now, is there?
I remember writing old fashioned snail mail letters, sometimes still do. Before email, we send each other messages via BBS, which wasn't much faster than snail mail and had a limited audience. In the early days of the internet email was a great tool but again, limited audience. You could only email people who had an internet connection and in the early days there weren't that many. My first IM experience was on AOL, long before email was really popular but you could only IM with other AOL members.
Texting came along but was held back for a long time by price. It was expensive. Funny push-to-talk hasn't replaced texting, but it hasn't seemed to have caught on quite the same way.
Now, it seems like we're moving more toward group communications via social media. I have friends who haven't emailed me in months, but we still keep up on Facebook. Sometimes trading private messages there. Instead of emailing dozens of people, now the bulk mail notifications go on FB or Twitter and only something private goes via email. The only place I really IM anymore is at the office.
None of that seems to have completely replaced talking. I have friends I've never seen not on the phone. It's just odd. With so many ways to communicate it seems to be stratifying.
Says who? Which Linux vendor would be sending out anti-competitive training materials for employees of another company? And why would any company let a vendor waste thousands of collective man hours with propaganda training and bribe employees to complete it? This is selling their products the same way health insurers are selling their product at town hall meetings.
I didn't really need another reason not to shop at Best Buy, but they keep them coming.
The kernel team is doing a pretty awesome job of speeding things up. Kudos.
Seconded. It also says good things about the state of the kernel and development team that they can focus on optimization and the user experience. It wasn't that long ago the focus was on getting wireless to work. We've come such a long way. Very impressive. Well done.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting ideas, but can anybody show me *any* significant, quantitative, comparative proof of improved ROI?
I can't. I watched a very large organization replace a duct tape model that worked with a service based architecture that never delivered a single working service in 3 years of massively increased spending.
Use the duct tape apps to prove user acceptance and usability. Then take the apps that work and rebuild them on a more solid code foundation. If all your apps are using a common database back end, they'll all be able to talk to one another. Where companies really dork themselves is when half their user apps are using Access as a back end, some using SQL Server, a couple OSS mods using MySQL and then a dozen different hosted apps like SalesForce.
In my experience it's better to have a bunch of duct tape apps that provide an 80% solutions while more long term development is going on than having your data scattered around in hosted applications outside the company.
it's just real hard to put up with their temperament sometimes, and the smell
Temperament I'll give you but there is hardly any smell, unless you run mature males in your herd. Most people don't for that very reason. When the boys are about 3 months old, they get a castration band and never develop that musky smell intact males get around breeding season. I used to run a billy in our herd and he was the only source of any noticeable odor, except for a slight ammonia smell in their rain shelter. Don't keep any intact males and you can have an odor free herd.
and not to eat just a dumb eating machine like a goat.
You definitely haven't been around goats if you think they're dumb. In many countries goats live indoors with the family and are house broken, just like dogs. Goats are alert, curious and very intelligent creatures. I'd put them close to the dogs on the intelligence scale, although they're clever in different ways.
I'll take a look at the form handler...which needed work anyway. Thanks for pointing that out.
It depends on how long you have snow on the ground, if you have a barn, if you bail your own hay or buy it and if you buy it, square bales or round. Lot of variables. Rolled hay is cheaper than square bales but you have to keep the hay dry and the goats from climbing on it. And a tractor if you're going to move it very far. I could save a lot on feed costs by buying rolled corn in bulk instead of bags of 12% sweet feed. A grain bin would be a good investment if you're going to have more than 10 or 20.
I generally don't bunk hay until well into November, until the fallen tree leaves either rot or the goats clean them up. The good news is around here (western, TN) is right about then the wild onion and cool weather weeds start coming up. They do love wild onion. You can tell when they've been eating it, they'll come up and give you a big onion burp. Woooo.
If they have access to any kind of evergreens, they'll graze on those. But if you have pine stands, they'll kill smaller trees if you leave them out there. I've seen them browse pine leaves preferably, even when they have options. It's really weird to watch them. They'll ignore a certain type of plant for weeks, then one day they'll clean it all out and move on to something else.
Nope, they can pick off even tiny leaves off sticker bushes without getting stuck. There were places on the property that were stands of dead, stripped sticker stalks. A couple years ago you couldn't even see through those places. Their hide is tough so they don't have any trouble walking through the thickets. Their lips and tongues have amazing dexterity. They can pick individual pellets out of their grain bin while avoiding the moldy ones.
I have a blog if you're interested. I'll try to get some video of them browsing to show how precise they can be, but it's hard because any time I'm out in the pasture they crowd around begging for cookies. If nothing else I'll try to take some pictures of the decimated blackberry bushes.
Kudzu makes decent forage. Kudzu hay typically has a 15-18% crude protein content and over 60% total digestible nutrient value, slightly lower on longer vines. Unfortunately it's hard to bale and store.
Since it stores a lot of starch in the roots, they can regenerate for a long time. My goats will eat anything that doesn't break off in the ground, including the seed pods. If they're still around, kudzu won't be able to get started again. They'll eat any vines that start. That includes kudzu, but also wild grape vines, poison ivy, and just about anything else that grows on a vine.
If we could cultivate the market for goat meat in the US, those vast areas overgrown by kudzu would immediately turn into potential grazing land. Of course, in an environmentally sensitive area, the goats would be almost as hard on native plants as the kudzu. So there are trade offs both ways. But since goat is a red meat with roughly the same caloric value and 1/2 the fat of skinless chicken, 50% lower fat than beef, and 1/3 the calories of pork you'd think we'd be eating more goat.
Being from the south, I think I would rank kudzu above all.
My goats will clean up kudzu like it's candy. Not only will they strip the leaves, you'll see them standing on their hind legs trying to drag the vines down out of the trees. They eat leaves, vines, stems, roots and all. Reminds of a casino buffet on seafood night. And because they have a 4 chambered stomach, the digestion process pretty much kills the seeds. I've never seen them spread it anyway. As a bonus, goats can handle the terrain kudzu seems to thrive in.
If goats don't eat cogongrass, then that is some bad stuff. They can strip the leaves off blackberry bushes while avoiding the stickers, all they leave behind are stands of dead stalks. If it's that bad...that's a real problem.
It's almost like there are qualified, knowledgeable adults making policy decisions these days. Quite a difference from the days policy was dictated by partisan fund raisers who's qualifications were decided by how much money they could raise, right Brownie? Sometimes during the dark days it was like our government was being run by Romper Room.
Since the internet has made the sharing of even expert-level knowledge convenient...
People in college today are paying roughly the same per semester in state school that I was paying to go to a private college a couple decades ago. And, just like the health insurance industry, the costs are rising much faster than the rate of inflation would justify.
Before long, he claimed, the whole bloated, expensive, lecture-based higher education system will face the first challenge to its very existence: open-source, online higher education that costs a fraction of four years at Harvard--but is good enough for employers who want a college graduate.
That's certainly true for some classes. I had classes that were simply too big to offer any meaningful interaction with the teacher, some with hundreds of students. Those could be replaced with online offerings. Some majors could be done entirely online, many could not.
Once you get up out of the basics it's harder to replace with an online offering. You can't do clinicals or labs online and in some medical professions your last year is basically all clinicals. But it's possible we could replace a lot of the fringe classes and departments universities keep because of tenure requirements. Particularly those that don't require labs. Yeah, yeah insert standard tenured professor defense here. The bottom line is we just can't afford to keep going like we are. Something has to give, tenure will be one of those things.
Maybe we move the required classes online. History, English, sociology, foreign language requirements and universities shrink to offering advanced specialty classes and hands-on labs.
Education has to change, just like health insurance has to change. The systems we have for both are dysfunctional and costing us well beyond what they should. We can't handicap systems to benefit a few while imposing suffering on millions. We have to try something different.
Color blind chimps everywhere rejoice.
Coverage at Ars also points out a provision that says, 'all Internet users must keep their connections "secure" and are responsible for what happens on them.
That sounds great, especially to those of us who have to deal with the Great Unwashed Masses PC problems, but most users are doing good to find the power switch. Making them responsible for what happens to the internals of their PC without their knowledge in a rapidly evolving threat landscape that even security professionals struggle with at times is blaming the victim. It's not their fault Windows is a highly porkable product.
They're teaching young people how to use computers in school but, with few exceptions, they're not teaching them how to use them safely. In many schools it would be the blind leading the blind in security education. Most teachers don't know enough about PC security to make any relevant contribution to solving the bigger problem. Ultimately, it's like trying to fight a fully involved house fire with a garden hose.
I'm not sure what the answer is, but I am glad that it's someone else being heavy-handed and dickish for a change.
I started a book years about a coordinated attack by a small group of people that blacked out the west coast for months. That was early 90's. Surprisingly little has changed. Security is better, but it's still astonishing how much of our power infrastructure is unprotected.
Almost as surprising is how few people are prepared for an extended power outage. Ever since I worked around power management systems, I've dragged around a generator and keep enough gas on hand to run it at least two weeks.
It says good things about our electrical grid that I've only needed the generator a handful of times in all those years. But I've also noticed over the years we've come to take the grid for granted and are woefully unprepared for a wide spread outage that lasted more than a week. An interesting mental exercise is to look around your house and think about what things would be worth without electricity.
Business Computers == WindowsXP
I guess we're one of the approximations. ;) Our office is more Ubuntu than Windows and people, astonishing to the Windows faithful, don't have any trouble getting their work done.
Almost any office could replace many, if not most, of their desktops with Ubuntu with very little difficulty. The level of effort increases to another level if you want to try replacing all of them.
Imagine having APT for a large percentage of your desktops. A couple keystrokes to run a script and they're all up to date. Sweet.
The U.S. Navy's and Marine Corp's NMCI computing infrastructure is all Windows XP.
I questioned the Navy's IT management for years, failing to see the long term wisdom behind the program and thinking it was a pork spending program awarded to political insiders. But, I'm forced to admit NMCI has been tremendously successful at bringing productivity to a near stand still. Patching computers no one can use is hardly even necessary.
As a bonus the Navy has an inexhaustible supply of boat anchors!
Absolutely brilliant.
Humans: It's what's for dinner!
But when it starts telling me the C:\ drive on my Linux box is infected it's hard to stop laughing.
Still was a job to get rid of the circle jerk pop ups.
It is distributed as a DLL...
Until Linux can run botnet dll's and find a place among p0wn3d hacker machines, it's going to remain a hobbyist toy. It's so wasteful and inefficient to hack computers one at a time.
Until NASA can finish the next generation Ares I rocket, which isn't likely to be finished before 2017...
What the heck is taking so long? 7 and 1/2 more years for a modified spam can? WTF? It's not like we have no experience with ballistic re-entry vehicles and the lift vehicle design is based on components already in operation. Why is it going to take almost another decade to field a working booster? Okay, it's got problems. Anything that has to go 17,000 mph in space is going to take some work, but come on. We have solved those problems before. We're not reinventing the wheel. That just seems totally ridiculous.
Is it really that hard, are the contractors trying to milk the project, or has NASA become such a bloated bureaucracy that it takes 10 years to field lobster claw technology? Hell, bring the Russian engineers in. They'll weld the doors closed, kick it the butt and boost it up there.
Oh, baloney. It's common sense. If I see someone walking around with a weapon like that, I'm calling 911. Let the cops figure out it's a replica or someone exercising their open carry right. That's what they get paid for.
And if you don't have the common sense to box something like that before walking around outside, then I don't feel a bit sorry for you if you get questioned by the police. And I'd expect the police to treat the gun as real and you as a potential threat. Use your f'ing head. No one can spot replica weapons from a distance, or divine that you're not some wingnut bent on starting the Glenn Beck Cuckoo Revolution or someone who just got laid off going over the edge. There are too many mass casualty incidents in this country involving guns to leave it to chance.
The way I see it, if you're being a pro-gun militant and get shot because you can't exercise a grain of common sense along with your 2nd Amendment rights, then as far as I'm concerned you died of stupidity.
The spokeswoman added that Gmail could potentially replace Microsoft Exchange, 'but this decision has not been made yet.'"
Quit dorking around the flip the switch already. We did and it was the best move we ever made. It was a little rocky at first, then smooth sailing ever since. We've noticed two outages in the last year, I think there have been three total. Only the recent one generated any calls. Overall that makes it more reliable than Exchange.
Not sure what holds companies back from making the change. I've heard the arguments, they don't hold up to reality. Google doesn't spy on our email and if it's something really sensitive we can add a password to the document or encrypt the content. I've done that exactly once in the last year. Your company email passes unencrypted through dozens of relays, regardless of what email provider you use. Any one of those relays could be copying and storing those messages. So what would make Google any bigger risk than any one of them?
Backups are the other thing I hear about a lot. If it's that important, you can set up Gmail to auto-forward some or all of your messages to another account or you can use any number of tools in Windows, Linux and Mac to keep backups, if you feel the need. So far email backups have been a big waste of time and drive space, but I suppose it's better that small waste than a big loss if something bad did happen.
That change freed up a lot of money. We didn't need an Exchange admin and we saved a bundle on license fees.
I don't know about anyone else, but it chaps my butt when someone tells me I have to adjust to tech trend of the moment. I'll adjust when I'm good and ready. And I'll be ready when it makes business sense. Like service architecture, before that it was web services, go back far enough the hot buzz was client-server. I don't use what's trendy, I use what works.
Like moving email to "the cloud"...I hate that term. We dumped Exchange in favor of corporate Gmail and not only saved a fortune but it's a lot less stress to manage. We switched because it made good business sense, not because it was trendy. And no one really had to adjust because most of our staff was already using GMail at home.
We don't need a web OS, we use Ubuntu on a lot of desktops and Linux servers. A web OS might be an advantage...some day. But I can't really see what that advantage is now. So, no need to "adjust" now, is there?
I remember writing old fashioned snail mail letters, sometimes still do. Before email, we send each other messages via BBS, which wasn't much faster than snail mail and had a limited audience. In the early days of the internet email was a great tool but again, limited audience. You could only email people who had an internet connection and in the early days there weren't that many. My first IM experience was on AOL, long before email was really popular but you could only IM with other AOL members.
Texting came along but was held back for a long time by price. It was expensive. Funny push-to-talk hasn't replaced texting, but it hasn't seemed to have caught on quite the same way.
Now, it seems like we're moving more toward group communications via social media. I have friends who haven't emailed me in months, but we still keep up on Facebook. Sometimes trading private messages there. Instead of emailing dozens of people, now the bulk mail notifications go on FB or Twitter and only something private goes via email. The only place I really IM anymore is at the office.
None of that seems to have completely replaced talking. I have friends I've never seen not on the phone. It's just odd. With so many ways to communicate it seems to be stratifying.
Linux vendors would do exactly the same thing.
Says who? Which Linux vendor would be sending out anti-competitive training materials for employees of another company? And why would any company let a vendor waste thousands of collective man hours with propaganda training and bribe employees to complete it? This is selling their products the same way health insurers are selling their product at town hall meetings.
I didn't really need another reason not to shop at Best Buy, but they keep them coming.
Oh, yeah. It was worth it.
The kernel team is doing a pretty awesome job of speeding things up. Kudos.
Seconded. It also says good things about the state of the kernel and development team that they can focus on optimization and the user experience. It wasn't that long ago the focus was on getting wireless to work. We've come such a long way. Very impressive. Well done.
Sadly, no.